Some cretins dreaming about bio-weapons does not give them any real capability. And no, they are neither easy to make nor cheap nor easy to use. This is just the usual exceedingly unethical fear mongering used to sell more copy and to keep the population docile.

It is also not a new tactics, but most people are still cretins that fall for it every time:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken

While that certainly plays a role, it is a minor one. It does stand in the way of solving things, but if you do not have developers that can do secure software engineering competently (and that is the normal case), then giving them too little time and money to do secure software engineering does not matter. The other thing is that people that actually understand software security are much less likely to declare something finished or secure than those with only a superficial understanding of things. Software security really is an additional, and exceedingly hard to obtain, qualification. That most "programmers" these days struggle even with simple things (see http://blog.codinghorror.com/t... , for example) is not the root cause.

Sorry, but no. For example, one of the most important threats these days in the banking industry is data leakage. No amount of input data validation is going to help one bit there. These aspects are all critical. Mess up one, and all is lost. That is what makes software security so difficult: You have to master the whole problem space before you can produce good solutions. Incidentally, there are rules "11: Always consider the business case" and "12: Do a conclusive risk and exposure-analysis and rate and document your findings" which are the make-or-break aspects and it are completely missing from the list.

You can. But you need to be aware that 99.9% of people doing PHP or Java or the JVM do not have what it takes to make anything that may see real attacks secure. People that can secure things in this particular problem space are exceedingly rare and exceedingly expensive. One problem is that you cannot use most/all libraries for security critical functions, and may well have to augment the JVM via JNI for secure input validation. Most Java folks are not capable of doing that at all.

While the brochure referenced is nice, anybody that needs it has zero business building anything security-critical. It does take a lot of experience and insights to apply the described things in practice in a way that is reliable, efficient and secure and respects business aspects and the user. Personally, I have more than 20 years of experience with software security and crypto, and looking back, I think I became a competent user, designer and architect only after 10 years on this way. The problem here is that as software security is very hard, a specialized form of the Dunning-Kruger effect applies. The things I have seen people do that though they understood software security are staggering. Unless you have achieved a holistic view of the problem-space, do not even try to design any security critical software.

Statistics show that women are much more likely to use poison.
Also, feminist logic immediately shows that AC is a man, as AC is obviously an asshole and only men qualify for that.
So I deduce that you are anti-feminist as you are not following feminist logic.

That said, I am anti-idiot myself.

You must be a brave or a stupid man. I would not eat anything prepared by somebody I treat like that. (Not that I treat anybody like that...)

To be fair, men are about the same, just with a different variant of social bullshit. My take would be that 99.99% of men have nothing to contribute to Wikipedia while 99.999% of women have nothing to contribute. What, that makes this "gender gap" look insignificant? Well, while lying with statistics is easy, truth is a little harder but usually possible.

What, common sense? No, no, no! You have completely misunderstood what this fight is about!

In other news, women are waking up to the little side-effects of requiring equal representation everywhere (instead of the sane "gender-neutral opportunity" -- "equal" opportunity is not doable, as talents, interests and education differ between individuals): http://www.smh.com.au/federal-... Of course, if there are no differences between the sexes (yeah, right...), then this is all imaginary.

Aehm, moderators can down-mod but not "delete".

It is pretty pathetic when original stories do not contain any journalism as in verification and clarification and using plain, apparently old-fashioned common sense. The correction is the only good thing here, and how common "journalism" fails to deliver seems to have become a story in its own right. Again.

In a very real sense, she is a preacher of hate. Some people take exception to that to the point of losing rationality. On the other hand, lets wait and see whether her story actually pans out. This may still be a publicity stunt, and it actually has all the characteristics of one.

You are overlooking the question of consistency of your chosen axioms with reality. That is very much a part of rationality. In fact, it is the basis. Deriving things from axioms is just a tool that usually comes in handy and is required in basically all practical applications of rationality, but it is not strictly necessary if you get axiom consistency with reality in some other way (which is not practical, hence reasoning is usually regarded as a part of rationality).

Sorry, but all mathematics and all theory, including the scientific method are "discovered". They cannot be "invented". Read up on the philosophical basics if you do not believe that.

This may be fake. We only have her word. And we know that she has gotten a lot less attention lately than she wants...