Since this is related to personal health issues, could they possibly be in violation of HIPPA privacy requirements?

You sound short

I didn't read it, but I would also guess that part of his reason for calling out programmers might be in order to refute the whole concept of "STEM" as a coherent subject. Like, "I learned to program, so that must mean that I understand particle physics," or "I'm an engineer, so I understand all science in general."

Doesn't cure all the ways they try to track you, but definitely puts a major dent in their efforts:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

It's funny. On the one hand, you have people screaming bloody murder because Obama is acting like a dictator, giving people healthcare that they don't want, and obviously, as an elected official, the President should follow the will of the people.

On the other hand, he's a spineless pandering lame-duck who is unable to make unpopular choices.

I don't know what to make of it. Ah, except maybe this little statement that you quoted is actually relevant here: "The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers." So what he's pointing out is that, with all the people demanding privacy and encryption and whatever else, those very same people will be looking for his head on a platter the first time encryption works against them. What he's pointing out here is that people are fickle and inconsistent, and it's foolish to run around satisfying today's whims without considering tomorrows reality.

Turns out he understands the nature of this "making hard choices" than you do.

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent

You are a true nimrod

You sound very closed minded. You confuse "not coding to your exact personal style" with "not a good coder". There's too much of that mentality lately, so I probably wouldn't choose to work for you anyway.

I'm going to echo what others are saying and say that I think your examples are bad. I wouldn't necessarily expect a developer to understand public key encryption unless they had a background of working with public key encryption. You don't necessarily need to understand that sort of thing to make web applications or iOS apps, so it really depends on the kind of development you're doing.

Regarding file encryption, I find the question to be reasonable. If you want to send an encrypted Excel file to someone, it's probably smarter to just use the built-in password protection and encryption. If you can trust that someone has Excel enough to send them an Excel file, then you can assume they have Excel enough to open a password protected file. I would not, however, trust that someone has GPG installed.

Getting back to your question, I generally estimate that roughly 80% of people are bad at their jobs, whatever they do. This is based on a couple decades of anecdotal evidence in the professional world, but it's borne out with the new experience I continue to have, and other people seem to share the experience.

Perhaps we are entering another species failure mode that we will have to solve for. Computers and the internet are great gifts to humanity, but it seems lately to have taken a bad turn. Instead of uplifting the human race, it's starting to look more like a trap.

I've spent my whole life involved with computers and networking. Now at times I wonder if I will eventually regret my contributions to building this better mouse trap.

I personally find that the risk of a dark totalitarian period that lasts for hundreds or thousands of years to be more threatening than any terrorist threat these dark systems purport to protect us from.

Humanity needs to figure out how we want to use these new tools. All this surveillance mode machinery is not good. It just takes one evil dictator to get control of this to trap us in ten thousand years of darkness.

It's a sad fearful reality we are marching towards these days.

In other words, you are just an arrogant bastard with no good answer.

But why you all mad about it?

Aspect oriented? Oh yay, what have the hipster programmers reinvented this time? Yawn...

I'm not saying that I don't understand the filesystem. I'm used to it, and I often forget how random and silly it is. My point is that if you try to look at it with fresh eyes, it is a bit silly.

And people tend to do what you've just done, which is to make up an order and arrangement that almost makes sense. But the truth is, the whole thing evolved over time, and almost none of those things were the original intention. As someone pointed out, /usr started out as the place for user home/profile directories, but people kept putting things in there that didn't belong, which lead to the creation of /home and the abandonment of /usr to "another place we put binaries, for some reason."

AFAIK, /var started out as a place for specifically variable-sized files. The idea was that if you had a set of files which might grow very quickly, you might want those on their own drive or partition so they wouldn't overrun the rest of the system. Now, when you get down to it, it's because sort of like the /home directory that doesn't belong to any particular user. Sort of like Windows "ProgramData" folder. And /etc was named that because it was a bit of a catch-all for anything else, but really now it's pretty much a dedicated "system configuration file" location.

But those are just the names, and my point wasn't just "Oh, I don't particularly care for the names". My point was, this is a structure that's grown organically over decades, and it is not really "clean". Do we really need /lib, /var/lib, and /usr/lib? Do we really need /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, and /usr/sbin? My impression is that some of this repetition was created as a bit of a kludgey way to solve some particular problem, and then left in place for compatibility/legacy reasons, and maybe just "we're not sure whether this will break anything, so let's leave it alone." And then, after sitting around that way for a decade, everyone was so used to it that it just seems like "the way it's supposed to be."

And fine, whatever. It works. People are used to it. Why change for the sake of change? But don't pretend like it was an elegant planned organization.