I think (s)he's is suggesting (s)he isn't old enough to have any...

If you're any good, you probably have another ten at least. Age-out in dev doesn't really start until 45, and isn't enforced with too much vigor until 55. After that, it'll totally depend on how many months ago your HR people finished college...

I was in IT before the 2000 bubble burst. They handed out truckloads of money. The bubble burst and no one could afford to pay anyone those crazy rates any more. As a result, a lot of people were suddenly out of work, and a lot of work ground to a halt. Eventually work returned, but at a much reduced (some say "corrected") rate. A lot of people changed industries or otherwise never made it back.

It'll probably be similar. As all of the experienced people become "too expensive" they'll be cut in large numbers, resulting in a lot of work that can't be done, because you really can't cut all of that experience. The returning group will be smaller, and less expensive.

Take advantage of the money times, and save a lot more than you think you'll need. Prepare to reduce your lifestyle to fit a future budget when the cuts come. Repeat as necessary.

In addition to blocking unwanted open ports to the world, have just about all of China's IPs in my ipfilter, denying them access to anything but HTTP (they might want to read my blogs...right?). Also the other countries called out by http://www.countryipblocks.net/malicious-internet-traffic/malicious-internet-activity-the-top-10-countries/ are likewise blocked. Yeah, that's about 10K IP blocks in the filter, but it seems to run just fine, and I end up with only sporadic and apparently random (or maybe successful) failures in my auth files.

Not that I want anyone to see this as any kind of challenge...I'm sure someone is spending more time to access and zombie my machines than I'm spending to try to cut them off!

I once ran into a problem trying to repair a mid-70's American car, on which some bolts were metric and others were standard. Inconveniently, 12mm socket fits nicely on 1/2-inch bolt head, but the threads, while close, aren't quite close enough, and would fail to hold. Over time it became more evident where the differences were, and it was manageable to find and use the correct bolt, but before figuring that out there were many re-repairs.

Wikipedia (the source to end all sources) agrees that 1982 was the first released music CD, by Billy Joel, no less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc

And speaking of "parent," let's not forget the damage that happens to them through "undesirable care," such as is often applied at the hands of children and other less-responsible people.

A stack of disks strewn about will certainly fare much worse for wear than disks more carefully tended.

Quality of the individual something notwithstanding, watching it more than once is a personal choice. If you're not the type to do that, even just on occasion, then owning probably isn't for you. If you're the type to re-watch, then owning makes sense.

It is the case that sometimes some people are in a place where bandwidth or storage doesn't allow watching an otherwise delivered video, and the disks then come in handy. Consider uses of video learning or motivation (such as for exercise), or even mundane repetitive review (say, kids and their stuff, which hopefully overlaps with learning and motiviation); it's hard to beat "popping it in" and having it turn on.

Uh, the sons of Adam?

Not at all. Each of those guys was an arguably fine leader, until they went off.

Hitler pulled the Germans out of the depression returning Germany to a prosperous state, even bringing the world the Volkswagen. Then he went nuts and invaded most of Europe, and slaughtered millions of people because he didn't feel they fit his weird mold of what a person should be. It was (in part) this fear-mongering that brought out a hatred of the gypsies, gays, Jews, and frankly any non-Arian that he used to really ramp up his world domination efforts.

Stalin likewise brought the Soviet Union back to prosperity after the depression, after a few failed attempts, and even eventually did a great job of fighting off the back-stabbing, Hitler-led Nazis. He then used the fear of a US-led world domination threat to become the counterpart super-power, including the introduction of the Iron Curtain. Fair enough, the US was no less fear-mongering at the time, with its own Cold War issues. While the US had McCarthism, Stalin had the KGB. At least the way it's been portrayed outside the Iron Curtain, it's a pretty powerful fear-based motivator.

Bush (the younger), whatever you think of his policies, used the attacks on the 11th of September (in part) to build a ferver that has led to full-scale military action against a few questionable countries, rivaling a cost and scale of World War II, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. All manner of fear and mongering continues out of this one, the least of which is a fear and misunderstanding of most things Islam, Arab, or, well, really anything "over there."

I, on the other hand, am not trying to scare anyone, or blame anything on "the other guy." I'm just pointing out a few guys that have done that; by far, not a comprehensive list, either.

Plausible deniability.

Whether it did go to Texas first, last, or in the middle, it's possible to deny that as an actual end-point. It can be excused away by identifying the Texan who's compromised PC is relaying the worm's payload...

Fear-mongering is a tried-and-true motivator. Worked for Hitler. Worked for Stalin. Worked for Bush.

Too many leaders, world and smaller-group, who can't motivate and bring their people up through their own efforts try to defer their failures by bringing the other guys down.

Sadly, millions of people listen to their rantings, buy into their fear, and support their mongering.

I answered honestly, based on my exposure to eating bananas, which is accurately 0-3 per day.. Some days none, most days one, some days more than one, very rarely 3 or more. <grin/>

Fair enough; you caught me skimming their page for quick facts; where they say "the 128/256-bit secured and encrypted SSL protocol" but, although I use the service, I didn't dig in enough to offer deep facts, and took that as an indication of the CR they generate. And I wasn't trying to suggest that even that would be easy to break, or that it isn't cutting-edge... Heck, a quick scan of some of the HTTPS sites I do visit all use 128-bit encryption. So maybe the use of "weak" in my statement was a little bit of a misnomer.

I agree with you, also, on the insecurity of the validation of the certificate requestor/hosts, but that's not unlike, as you say, many other cert providers require. At StartCom there's a small fee and a few easy hoops to validate you are who you say you are, but even if you jump through those hoops, your typical user isn't going to know the difference when they see the green bar (or whatever) in their browser showing that SSL is working on their session (if they do notice...).

I think, though, for addressing the concern of the OP, it's more about wrapping the credentials passed to a site than a trust relationship with the site. Having an account on a site presupposes some accepted level of trust (or foolishness), and wrapping that traffic is a separate concern. If you're giving your credentials to a seedy site, that's your business, but keeping those credentials (which are way too often the same as on other, less seedy sites, ala http://xkcd.com/792/) and other traffic out of the clear is probably still desirable.

That's what I was gonna say!

The free certs from the likes of StartCom are relatively weak 128/256-bit encryption. That's a little weak if you're trying to secure any kind of serious credit card transaction, but just fine if you want to stop the average sniffer at your local coffee house from grabbing your blog password and seeing your self-hosted e-mail.

And annoying users can be avoided by updating the cert in the month before they expire (services like StartCom send reminders, gratis).

The virtual hosting is an issue, especially for a lot of self-servers. The free certs don't often offer much wild-carding or multiple domains. If you think about it, the certs that do cost tend to cost less than the bandwidth and electricity to the servers that are running those sites, and even inexpensive certs offer wildcards.

At the very least, you can still secure all of the sessions on the host with an SSL cert for the server, and annoy users with "cert seems to be for a different server" messages (who hasn't seen that for akamai-hosted sites?); in the end, most users will blow by that warning anyway, and the traffic will be encrypted.

Or more useful; he could rewrite PERL in that amount of time.

While I'm sure this happens a lot, he's not the kind of hacker I worry about.