If I remember correctly Google said they would keep the data until the Canadian authorities had stated they had finished examining it to determine what laws were breached. Once the evidence had been evaluated and they get authorization, they will delete it. Basically they are saying they won't delete evidence of a possible wrong doing until the appropriate authorities say it is OK. This means that they have to hold on to the data collected in each country until they get permission from that country's authorities. Sounds like and administrative nightmare.

Its also a perfect example of how the laws don't reflect how the technology was designed to work. WAPs are designed to handle two situations:

1. I want to share with everybody, a.k.a "Open WAP"; and
2. I want to share with only a select few, a.k.a. "Encrypted or closed WAP".

From the technology design point of view if you run across an open WAP then you "know" they want to share. If its closed then you know they don't. I agree that it gets very grey when you knowingly start to collect user ids and passwords. If its an automated download of everything that is available, sort of like a wget, then you can argue the stuff should have been secured.

The laws try to protect the group of people who are too lazy to learn how and why you should secure a WAP as well as your data. The problem is how to differentiate between those open WAPs that people want to share from those where people don't.

All public key encryption systems practically require both parties to have both public and private keys. Its true that you could send a "secret" message by using a public key and only someone with the matching private key could decrypt it. The problem is that in that scenario the receiver can't authenticate who the sender is. The way around this is to first encrypt the message with the sender's private key and then with the receiver's private key. Only someone with the receiver's private key can decrypt the outer "envelope" of the message and get the message still encrypted with the sender's private key. They then use the sender's public key to get the clear text. The receiver therefore "knows" that only the sender could have sent the message. Its generally used as part of a digital signature for the message.

Since public encryption/decryption is computationally intensive most systems use a private key system to encrypt the message and a public key system to encrypt the one time use private key.

Lookup symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic systems for more info.

You can't stop evolution, you can only have some ( albeit small) effect on the conditions that the population is adapting to. The more "dumb proof" you make products the more the environment favours "dumbness". In effect the "dumb" population has a competitive advantage and we therefore are selecting for dumbness.

Reminds me of an idea I heard of several years ago. During the middle ages, the first son was the designated heir, the brightest of the left-over sons and daughters were sent to join various religious organizations that practised celibacy. In effect the church was dumbing down the population while selecting its own members from the brightest of what was left.

Reminds me of a company I worked for. They had a data centre divided into 5 zones, each zone had a UPS. Each zone was connected to the neighbouring zone with a transfer switch and each UPS could handle 2 zones until the diesel generators kicked in. Each year for 5 years management decided that the cost of the downtime to do annual maintenance was too high so it wasn't done. Outside power finally goes away and 4 of the five zones stay up. The investigation determined that the battery ( natch the power is out) powered transfer switches on both neighbouring zones failed because the battery failed. Turns out putting in new batteries was part of the annual maintenance check list and they had a shelf life of 4+ years.

How about the company with the diesel generator that has 5 hours of fuel. They test it for 1 hour every year. On year 5 the power goes out and the generator runs for one hour before running out of fuel. Seems the test procedure didn't include refuelling the generator.

The point is that even with what you think is the best of planning and testing some time stuff happens.

I'll deny it it just to show it can be done.

There are tens of millions of lines of code in a variety languages that help run the world that were written and are maintained by hard working programmers who have never used C. There is also a lot of code that is written in C. It depends on where and what you are talking about.

The reality of the situation is that in industry there are a large number of camps. Some have huge repositories of code that is probably older than the OP that is mission critical and is still chugging along very well thank you very much. There are other places where the latest and greatest objected oriented, web based language invented at a University is the vogue. You have everything in between.

Saying one particular language is that basis of computing displays a very limited knowledge of the wide breadth and depth of computing both in industry and academia.

Now back to the original topic. What language(s) to use to teach beginning computing.

There are two basic methods. One is to teach the nitty gritty machine level first and then move up to higher and higher levels of abstraction. I.E. Bits, Nibbles, Bytes et al. The second is to start at a higher level of abstraction, teach the higher level concepts, such as iterative loops, without getting bogged down with the minutiae of what's under the hood. With the second method you can get more specific if you need to.

I would argue that most people will get bored with method 1 and have no real need for it. Method two does require selecting the level of abstraction you want to start at, you tailor the selection to the group you are trying to teach. People who argue C are simply picking a lower level of abstraction than people who argue for Java, either can be "right" or "wrong" depending on the people in the class and the objectives of the class.

I also think that a good grounding in computational theory and the study of algorithms is a good idea. If you know why a bubble sort on a 1 million entry list is a bad idea then it doesn't really matter what language you decide to not implement it in :-)

Mobo Manufacturer

Lets see, I can help these guys develop a new use for my line of wonky mobo's, get favourable mention all over the world on places like slashdot and reap the benefit of every geek with excess cash and a yen for a super computer or I can stand back and maybe they find someone else who has a "better" board or they develop their own.

Hmm lets think on this one