The major reason for the rapid capitulation of French to Germany in 1940 is that we were crushed.

There were between 50 000 and 100 000 French military killed during the 2 months of the German invasion in 1940 (+ the wounded of course). The French army was vastly oversmarted and overpowered but it did attempt to resist.

Please read a bit of history and stop spreading nonsense. The vast majority of French people still deeply hated the German 20 years after the first world war.

http://www.amazon.com/Darkening-Welding-Helmet-Torch-Welders/dp/B000HKZ73I

The way to make programming cool is to pay programmers decently. Currently, if a plumber comes to my house, I pay more per hour than I would get as a freelance programmer. Why bother with the long studies and the headaches ?

Personally, I hope the TSA does expand to random traffic stops. I hope they start impementing strip searches for walking down the sidewalk. I want them to set up shop at the OWS rally near you. The faster they can provoke a full-out general revolt against their nonsense, the happier I'll be.

Things do not work like this. Ask the Germans. You must revolt before this kind of thing before it has become too strong. Now is the time.

The generation which has had the good life and currently has money (the 50+ years old, I'm 52) has been collectively piling up private and state debt (to be repaid by the younger) and arranged to avoid what should be its burden: the education of the young. Yet we are the children of the 60s, times of dreams of brotherhood, universal love, and selflessness. One really has to wonder what went wrong.

PHK actually hints at 2 things: that strings should have been length+array, and that the compiler should know about it.

The first assertion is subject to discussion and has its serious issues (strings would have become foreign to other C arrays, what integer size etc.).

The second point is I think more clear-cut. As it is, the C compiler knows mostly nothing about strings, which means that it's easy to design a different strings library and use it instead of strcpy() et al (cf. c++ strings). The only constraint is that you have to present a zero terminated string to system and foreign libraries interfaces.

Embedding the string structure in the compiler would have ossified the choice, making C a much less adaptable language, in contrast with its other features, and a fault of style.

This is quite wrong. You are forgetting that Ethernet at the time was a shared medium: all workstations on a network segment shared the same coaxial cable, and network saturation was often an issue. This began to change with filtering bridges in the 90s and became a non issue with twisted-pair on switching hub star architectures much later.

We're talking about a case where supplier storage is compromised here (if I got the sony case right). So this is not about trying to log in but about breaking the hash. See:
  http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/05/2028256/Cheap-GPUs-Rendering-Strong-Passwords-Useless

Long passwords are still useful if the supplier behaves responsibly (ssl connection + salted hash storage only).

It is my humble opinion that naming classes "function" is not very helpful... And it's great that javascript has an eval statement, but Lisp (1958?) may claim some prior art here...

Javascript is a crappy language, up there with PHP. They happened to be at the right place at the right time, which allowed them to gain an extremely wide usage that their intrisic qualities would certainly not warrant.