Maybe you should learn to use the toilet without urinating on yourself. Most of us manage to do it well before kindergarten, but I guess there are always a few slow learners.

I agree. I refuse to purchase anything contaminated by Steam.

Sorry, Sid. I've bought every Civ game that's ever come out, but you've lost me as a customer.

You find people driving drunk all the time despite the fact that they know it's unsafe and illegal.

Just because people do it frequently doesn't mean it's a good idea.

No, but then I wouldn't be surprised if you substituted Python, Perl, Java, or C for Ruby in that statement. The proportion of programmers who can write secure code is a relatively small proportion of the number that can write code in any language.

A great big helping of THIS. It is insanely difficult to write really secure code in any language. (Although it's harder in some than in others).

Look at Postfix -- it was designed and written specifically with security in mind by one of the world's foremost experts on TCP/IP security, and it STILL has had security bugs. If a hacker god like Wietse Venema has security bugs in his code, what chance do mere mortals like us have of writing secure code?

This is something that has to be tackled on multiple levels -- in library code, at the compiler, at the operating system, and even in the language itself. Modern languages have garbage collection that prevents (most) memory leak issues; we need a similar language-level mechanism to address common security issues. Perl's taint mode is a definite step in the right direction, but there needs to be more research done on language-level security features.

Likewise, we have static and dynamic code checkers that highlight problematic code; while there are some for security, we need more/better tools in this area, and more importantly we need to teach young programmers to actually USE them, or better yet build them into the compiler so you HAVE to use them.

My guess is that this is a technology demonstrator, and will not be available to average punters on real cameras. Saying that an old large format camera with a 8*8 back would be very cool

Large format photography has always been the realm of professional photographers and serious artists - no one else is willing to deal with the expense and inconvenience.

A medium-format digital back (1/4 the size) goes for 10K - 35K. If this ever makes it to market, I'd be surprised if it was less than $100K. There are photographers for whom that would be a good investment, but most people will never even see one.

Now if someone were really evil, they would have had it redirect to Trinidad (the neighborhood in DC, not the island).

Turning a bunch of pasty white racists lose in one of the most violent black neighborhoods in the country could be ... interesting.

Steele is a career GOP Apparatchik. It's not like they just found some black guy who looks good in a suit at random. They found a black guy who looks good in a suit who had worked his way up party ranks and has held elected office.

You don't understand the mentality of straight-party-ticket voters.

It doesn't matter what THEIR guys do, only what the OTHER team's guys do. The attitude is, "Well, he might be a crook but he's OUR crook".

I've been involved in state politics. It's unbelievable. I've seen guys with FELONY FRAUD CONVICTIONS get re-nominated time and again for their state House of Representative seat because they have the weight of the local political machine behind them (and, presumably, because they've got dirt on somebody higher up).

It happens at the national level, too. The only thing that can come up with that explains Michael Steele's continued tenure at the helm of the GOP after strippergate and all the other scandals is that he's got the key to a closet full of skeletons.

I don't think the old lady who was the lone holdout was "less politically sophisticated". My bet is she was a life-long straight-party-ticket voter. There's a lot of people out there (on both sides) who think that anything is OK as long as their party is the one that's doing it. "He may be a crook, but he's OUR crook"

You know, you are allowed to have more than one drive in your system, and it's highly unlikely you need fast storage for everything.

A 64G SSD for the OS and active file and a 1.5T hard drive for long term storage makes for a very nice desktop system. Even with a laptop you can get by quite nicely with a small internal SSD and a large external drive for your multi-terabyte music and pr0n collection.