When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.

The IPV6 crowd pooh poohs this and says blocking IP addresses is not the answer. Well not for an established users, but for registration and spam posting it is the answer. Or was.

I will get off the internet before dealing with innumerable attack vectors from our botnet friends in Russia and China. The loss of my little sites will be no big loss. But everyone remaining will be inundated, and they won't be able to deal with it either.

Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible. Certainly that's what I've seen these last few years from logging spam attack IP addresses.

Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves. Do you have any idea how many IP address ranges we are attacked from in places like Latvia? Let them do their attacking with IPV6. Good riddance.

I thought we past thinking we had any privacy left.

The question is how do we get the media to stop presenting the 2 parties as the only choices?

When there are more than 2 legitimate choices.

When there has been a legitimate third party candidate (Ross Perot, John Anderson, etc.) they were fully covered in media.

We'd have to cut it nearly in half to get back to 1850 pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels. btw, all of that CO2 since then is from fossil fuels whose carbon has not been in atmosphere since before dinosaurs. This is what people do not understand, for example your question.

"... a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called dark profiles - "pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary users, Losse said, but if the person eventually signed up, Facebook would activate those latent links to other users."

LinkedIn did a form of this, apparently just storing invites to my email address from members even though I wasn't a member. After some time, I registered with LinkedIn for other reasons and was immediately linked to those who had sent me invites in the past.

All the advice to rewrite it is misguided. Maybe rewrite small parts that you need to to keep it working on new hardware, or whatever, but if it works, I would think that wholesale rewriting is asking for trouble. The Ars article is full of great advice about what you should do to manage a large codebase going forward, but actually it doesn't really address the question of what to do about a large legacy codebase that wasn't written with best practice. The best software is written by incremental improvement of what went before (no matter how badly written, as long as it meets its specification) - big projects written from scratch usually fail.

so very true. insightful.

G2 is being called virtually obsolete. I looked up G2 in Wilipedia comparison of programming languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages and it is listed as:

Language: G2
Intended use: Application, inference, expert system
Paradigms: common graphical development and runtime environment, event-driven, imperative, object-oriented

Plus the search on G2 shows there is a G2++. So what does obsolete mean to those calling it obsolete?

btw, I'm an RPG programmer and I've been writing tons of new business software every day for the last 23 years, the whole time the language has been declared obsolete.

Now get off my lawn.

If that's the case, the stated or implied directive is don't break this. Which means probably no major rewrite.

This should be +5 Insightful. It's the bottom line for production software.

Tempest, that is an awesome story.

Cassette tapes unreliable storage? That's one of the kinder ways to describe it. :) But seriously, I taught myself programming with the Z-80 assembler/debugger and would make multiple backups to tape to counter the occasional read glitch that rendered the tape contents lost for all practical purposes. (Although in a pinch attempting to read it in over and over with fingers crossed hoping that one time it would work was occasionally successful, at which point you wrote it out to a new backup tape.)

Wrote Double Deck Pinochle as my first program, later rewrote for DOS (is freeware out there somewhere), rewrote it in Java a few years ago (seriously proper OO architecture, but an interesting experience to rewrite 8086 to Java), and just so happens am now rewriting from Java to RPG for my IBM i (iseries AS/400) web server. Again an interesting experience. :)

For those who might wander about RPG looks like these days, I have open sourced a couple of projects:

http://code.google.com/p/rdwrites/downloads/list

(the ascii source downloads can be viewed in a text editor.)

And I have the TRS-80 to thank for it all. So happy 35th, TRS-80.

oh, ok, thanks for the info.

yeah, I'm not mixing them, it's cpc, but the gist of what you're saying is right.

but then if you're getting a 200k legitimate page views maybe 2000 bucks a month is reasonable...

I did a search today on what Facebook click rates were and the answer I'm seeing was 50 to 60 cents per click. That's $100,000, not $2000.

I can't believe advertisers were bidding to pay 50 cents per click so I hope I have misunderstood the numbers, but saw today elsewhere an article that mentioned paying $2 per click, so apparently this was thought to be effective. I say I can't believe it because of the high percentage of bot activity on any page.

Advertisers were apparently hoping it was legitimate potential customers. This is hitting national press today so lots of people will know better now. So will Facebook shareholders.

If it's mostly bots, then the amount advertisers are willing to pay will go down in proportion to how much bot "views" go up...

And as GP said, Facebook stock tanks. The amount advertisers pay is Facebook's income.

Advertiser's currently paying about 50 to 60 cents a click from what I'm seeing in a search today. It should go down to about a dime per click, Facebook $1 billion in income drops to $200 million, and Facebook shares tank likewise.

If you don't know about the jpg execution attack, you don't need to be giving me any advice.