Sorry for advertising my own product, but pretty much on topic here. :) Buy two (cheap) servers from completely different networks / data center providers, and keep them replicated with http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Replication. You can set up MX records to both of them, and use DNS to switch between the replicas for IMAP/POP3 as needed. Either one of the data centers can die and your mail won't stop working. Or keep one of the replicas in local network and your mail keeps working even if your internet connection dies.

(Then you'll only need to hope that there are no software bugs bringing down everything.)

Dunno how it works in Germany, but I think the people should be able to decide for themselves what kind of education they want, whenever they want (+- a few years). And maybe more importantly: If you decide wrong at some point, you should be able to switch if you're good enough. I think the way it works in Finland is good enough. I dropped out of high school (wanted to code all nights), finished it 7 years later when I had more motivation, had no problem getting into university trying out something new interesting I re-learned at high school (biotech!), then deciding it wasn't really worth the trouble and switching back to computer science and getting a BSc out of it. The high school and college stories I hear from the US are pretty depressing usually.

My laptop comparisons nowadays:

Apple laptop:
MagSafe

Non-Apple laptop:
Non-MagSafe

Until some laptop has MagSafe or similar I won't even consider it. I remember too well when I used to trip over the power cords and drag my laptop on the floor. Or break the power plug because it got twisted when moving the laptop in a bad direction. Or stepping on the power plug and breaking it. (Yeah, I don't treat my laptops all that well.)

I thought it was somehow referring to the "Captain's log" recordings.. Yeah, haven't watched that much star trek.

Any time you join an existing project you have to learn how to use its libraries, this is no different. Yeah, maybe you'll save a few hours of learning time if some of it is standardized by the base language. If that becomes a real issue with someone you probably shouldn't have hired him/her anyway.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's possible to have arrays of ints, floats and everything. Looks to me like your idea would assume that array works only on structs? Anyway here's the implementation: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/file/tip/src/lib/array.h

Well, that kind of GENERATE_SORT() seems very ad-hoc way to do it and very specific to a sort.. My method looks more like this (dynamically growing type safe arrays):

#include "array.h"
int foobar_cmp(const struct foobar *f1, const struct foobar *f2); ..
ARRAY_DEFINE(foobars, struct foobar);
struct foobar f; ..
array_init(&foobars, 16);
array_append(&foobars, &f); ..
array_sort(&foobars, foobar_cmp);

I don't think that's much different (or more difficult) from how you'd do it with C++ templates. Of course implementing array.h is easier with C++.

You can do all kinds of nifty stuff with macros and gcc/clang extensions to provide type safety to C. Yeah, if you don't already have a library for that it can be a bit difficult to write one (or find one you like). But once you have the library it's very easy to write (mostly) type safe code with C. For example I have a type safe array_sort() in C.

I kinda did in my next sentence, but whatever..

Is the confirmation something like OK/Cancel? I also tend to click OK buttons without hardly even reading them. That's why potentially security sensitive questions shouldn't have such simple buttons, but rather two (radio?) buttons that require you to read (and hopefully understand) what you're doing, such as: "Replace network settings from QR" and "Keep the existing network settings".

Yes, there are some advantages to using SQL database, like I said.. But I highly doubt "huge speed advantage" is one of them, unless you compare to a really badly set up system. I know people have switched from DBMail to Dovecot simply because Dovecot is so much faster..

Email isn't stored in SQL, because typically it's rather pointless. Full text search indexing doesn't require SQL, and it's more efficient without SQL anyway. There are some good use cases for storing emails in SQL database, but efficiency isn't one of them.

I wasn't planning on fixing all of security problems, but the typical case of clicking open random email attachments or running random programs from internet should and could be made safe, while still keeping the user interface user friendly. Those are the reasons for most of today's security problems.

SELinux doesn't address the problem. I agree with grandparent, although I think the focus should be more about on the UI side. The really low level implementation could perhaps be addressed with SELinux, but it's not a practical solution for any GUI app currently. For example how would you prevent Open Office from deleting everything in your home dir with SELinux, while still allowing it to read and write arbitrary documents? Yeah, you can't unless you manually go changing the labels every time you want to write somewhere.

I thought about how to implement an actually secure operating system in 2004, where you could safely just run any random program from internet, but no one cared to listen and I moved on.