Yeah, it's like three or four whole mouse clicks to make it happen....

C'Mon people, Microsoft does enough shit wrong, we don't need to make crap up.

???

The giveaway was probably when the blue screen was replaced with CIA's logo and the text "All your base are belong to us."

Ask Siemens. They designed the equipment the Iranians are using and wrote most of the control software to operate in a Windows environment. Not that it would have mattered, once you've got an agency with the resources of CIA or Mossad after you it's only a matter of time before they find a way in. Linux is not proof against malware delivered via HUMINT assets.

It sounds like you're a little older than me but we both see this much the same way.

I have as much interest in useful or interesting new technologies today as I had when I was 21. I'm also significantly quicker at getting up to speed with them and more aware of things like pros and cons and the importance of choosing the right tool for the job than I used to be at that age.

However, if you asked me right now, I'm quite sure that I couldn't crank out a new TodoMVC example in this week's front-end JS framework as fast as a 21-year-old who just learned it can. Since not a lot of people solve real problems or make real money writing toy to-do apps, I don't find this situation too threatening. ;-)

The thing is, I've long since stopped being impressed by this week's front-end JS framework, this week's UI trends and visual design language, and this week's new programming language that looks and feels like C or JS with a thin coat of paint over it. I could get up to speed with them to the point where I too could write to-do apps in half an hour, but to me that's like deciding to learn some new GUI toolkit just to write Tetris or learning some new database API just to write a PIM or whatever we're calling them these days. As you say, these kinds of tools are so ephemeral now that they tend to be very trendy and generate a lot of hype, but they are often popular more because of some big sponsoring organisation than any particular innovation or technical merit.

To me, about the only thing more dull is evangelists for a specific browser (why?!) telling us all about these great new features it has for writing large-scale applications... when the biggest web apps out there still tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than stuff many of us "old programmers" were working on in the last millennium, at which time some of those features actually were quite innovative.

Next week, all these elite young programmers, who are leaving people like you and me and our meaningless track records of building actual working and revenue-generating projects in their wake, will probably notice that MV* is not the only possible UI architecture, that building an application that has to run for years around a framework that has a shelf life measured in months might not be such a great idea, and that JS is actually a very bad and very slow language that just becomes not quite so bad with the ES6 changes and only moderately slow with modern JIT compiling engines.

Just don't tell them that the entire web apps industry probably represents closer to 5% of the programming world than 95% and some of these state-of-the-art ideas are actually 50 years old. Such talk is the stuff of nightmares, and they aren't old enough to hear that kind of horror story yet. ;-)

Dude, it's the Government. That $5 wrench cost at least $25,000.

I see what you did there.

-Rick

Where I live they haven't bothered to make any provision for back up power to the repeaters on their coax plant. Power goes out? Kiss your phone service goodbye, even if you've got the battery in your modem. They finally did upgrade us to DOCSIS 3, about eight months ago, so now our peak hour speeds have gone from atrocious to tolerable FWIW.

"However, the BND did not inform the German Chancellor's office,"
Can you say plausible deniability?

All I'm seeing is "some guy posted a blog entry about a three-year-old paper". Surely it must have been on Slashdot before, though I can't actually find it with Google.

They're not. The GP obviously doesn't realize that Time Warner spun off Time Warner Cable quite some time ago.

You might consider that there are at least two plausible explanations for this.

1. Older people can't or can't be bothered to keep up.

2. Older people can keep up just fine, but actively choose not to use certain new technologies or to avoid them for certain types of projects because in their judgement those new technologies aren't the best option for what they need to achieve on those projects.

There are plenty of both types of older developer around in the software development industry. Obviously one type tends to get more useful work done. Unfortunately but inevitably, inexperienced developers frequently mistake one for the other. Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

MIT Developing AI To Better Diagnose Cancer

FFS, it's not AI. It's a mindless program. Unthinking software. Data analysis software. Innovative to some degree perhaps, but AI? Hardly. No better than me stumbling in here and calling some DSP code I'd written "AI." Well, except I wouldn't do that. :/

When AI gets here, we'll have to call it something else what with all this crying wolf going on.

Its a problem because the OS isn't checking the entirety of the app for correct signatures, just part of it. Which kinda removes the point of checking at all.

But legal skills create money.

No. Legal skills take money from place A and move it to place B. Lawyers don't create value. Engineers do.