Isn't that as it should be, after working and saving all your life? Net worth includes possessions, house, savings for retirement, etc. Also, take the aging one-percenters (or the 0.1%) out of the numbers (or use median instead of mean) and I bet the disparity growth is a lot flatter. Fundamentally, there's a difference b/t being well off because you worked hard all your life and being well off because you (1) owned the means of productions, (2) bought off legislators, and (3) found a way to exploit others.

In 1995, NSA added a single bit-rotation to SHA that made it considerably stronger, but they didn't explain their reasoning at the time. It took several more years before academia found significance weaknesses, with 2004 being the year that SHA-0 (as the original, non-rotated version is now called) was really cracked wide open. That (arguably) puts them about a decade ahead (in a situation where they willingly tipped their hand). These folks employee the most math PhD's in the world and have their own chip fabs... it's not hard to imagine them being two decades ahead on some important cryptographic questions.

I want to be support libertarians, but these just-so stories do nothing to advance their credibility. In your example, being big gives you resources that you can use to cover up the problem (for decades), bribe public officials, corrupt scientific debate, conduct media blitzes, create shell corporations, intimidate witnesses, and [in some cases] force consumers to contractually relinquish their right to legal redress. Good luck trying to fight that on lower-middle class wage. It happens, but with such rarity and friction that this game-theoretic scenario is not going to unfold in the way you describe.

While there are definitely a lot of judgement calls and tradeoffs to consider when designing a language, syntactic convenience is a big part of why we use programming languages to begin with.

As you indicate, the operator overloading argument was/is bogus. I suspect that everyone tried to misuse the feature when it was introduced with C++, in much the same way that everybody used a dozen different fonts the first time they ran a WYSIWYG word processor. The people who got bit by this bad code went on to write best practices and coding standards that breathlessly prohibited operator overloading and Java followed suit. So you have dumb things like == testing for reference equality of strings, Vec3D classes that you must .add() and .subtract() instead of + and -, and naturally-ordered things that you can't compare with < and >. Hopefully one day Java will reverse this bad decision too.

Yeah... I always thought we should be "bombing" them (the Islamic states) with girly mags and Britney Spears CD's.

Secularization is a solution.

Whoever gets tarred with the biggest stigma would be the loser. The justice system you imagine would decide cases based on gossip and innuendo, on ill-researched half-truths spouted by loud mouths and anonymous forum posters, on the popular passions of the current moment, on who voted for the wrong party or liked the wrong vices or joined the wrong religion (or the wrong sub-sub-denomination of a religion). Seriously, where did you get those rose-colored glasses of human nature? If we worked like that, we wouldn't need a justice system: mobs and vigilantes would dispassionately confront the accused, gather witness statements, and determine the appropriate judgement.

No, you'd be submitting them to people who mostly don't know anything about the field and are prohibited from researching outside the curated environment of a courtroom. And yeah, that would suck for science. But there's a difference: science produces extremely technical descriptions of the real world. Law, by contrast, should (in theory, and sometimes in fact) be executable by laypersons... you could replace juries with panels of lawyers or judges versed in the technical aspect of the law and probably get better "technical" outcomes. But too much technicality and the law becomes divorced from the day-to-day real world wisdom of the people who are subject to it. The operations of law require a balance b/t technical and human factors that's not required in the sciences.

• Full investigation and prosecution of NSA officials.
• Repeal of retroactive warrants, retroactive teleco immunity, secret NSL orders, and other extra-judicial bullshit.
• Immediate legislation to broaden the definition of domestic surveillance and establish strict penalties for companies who cooperate with it.
• Amnesty/whistleblower protection for Snowden. Oh, and his passport back.

Um, no, that pretty much is the case with computers. Unlike stealth technology (your example), you don't have to have a multi-billion dollar military-industrial partnership to accomplish something clever with computers. You've just got to spend time learning and tinkering. And these security flaws aren't some fundamental-problem-of-physics stuff... it's often just a matter of sniffing out broken/shoddy code, which is pretty much the standard output of the industry. If you think differently, you're probably one of those people who refers to your nephew as a "computer genius" because he got your email working again that one time.

Here's the other deal: companies would rather shut you up than to acknowledge and fix the flaws in their own products. They'd also rather their customers live with the risk. For many companies, it is only the threat of disclosure that makes them invest the time and resources needed to secure their systems. (I'll grant that most software companies seem to have finally accepted this reality and tackle security more heavily, but it seems that the auto companies are still trying to play legal hardball.) And most security researchers (including this one, if other comments I've seen are correct) are willing to give manufactures some advance notice (though it resulted in court troubles in thanks, apparently). But ultimately the utmost professional obligation of a security researcher is to inform the public so they can either protect themselves or force the manufacturer's hand.

Pretty sure he dug it up for his country, and against the real traitors (his employers) who are usurping the autonomy of the people of the United States.

At any rate, he undoubtedly sought the Booz Allen gig because he suspected agency wrongdoing based on his prior experiences with the NSA/CIA. I don't think you could ask for a better whistleblower than this: someone willing to get the full story, obtain and screen evidence, and responsibly disclose the matter to public attention (while giving up a $200,000/year Hawaiian lifestyle).

Because it's running in multiple worlds simultaneously? It's not just using 1's and 0's but superpositions of the two that are effectively in both states at once. Heh... I'm really don't understand this stuff, but the big deal about quantum computing is that it will make some previously intractable (e.g., non-polynomial) problems accessible to us. All problems in complexity class BQP become, essentially, polynomial on a quantum computer. If you've got enough qbits, among other things.

And you won't make it universal until you bake into a popular protocol that's easy to use, that doesn't require extensive setup or pay-to-play, and that doesn't allow the user to trust a suspicious connection. OpenSSH and bitcoin have probably done it best so far, and I'm not sure that's anywhere close enough for the general public.

Even then, I think we underestimate the arrogance of law... if you successfully made encryption universal, then laws would be passed to force decryption (5th be damned) or monitor the endpoints.

Preserving liberty ultimately requires activism and civil disobedience.

And "var" is terser than the average class/type name.

...which are implicit/ducked-typed. In a statically-typed system, you explicitly define the interface for the sake of the type system. To help it help you, so to speak.

Granted, this is more language specific, but most dynamic langs have evolved from being able to run as straight-line scripts with no nesting/front-matter. I was trying to list all of the things that make dynamics langs briefer in general... beyond casts. :-)

Don't forget (1) type declarations; (2) array initializers, (3) storage class identifiers; (4) interfaces; (5) generic types; (6) more verbose API's for reflection (and damn near everything else); and (7) mandatory class "container" for static methods, constants, and globals. And at the design level, there's even more opportunity for brevity since various cheats are available, such as defining classes and methods at runtime, etc.

Of course, that's talking in generalities. Static langs are doing more now to reduce verbage and copy some dynamic-language "feel". C# especially since it introduced local type inference, anonymous methods/closures, LINQ, and DLR...

It pretty much is BS... one tell-tale sign is the outer "wrapper" story explaining how he got the news. This is a common narrative crutch that lets an author "ease into" introducing his world. Instead of saying "I got a message and met my contact in the middle of the night", there is a slow, omnious build-up to the dramatic unveiling of the story's payload.

Then there the dialog... it's very tight, TV-like script with a lot of back-and-forth that reads punchy (“You don’t know jack") while chopping up the message into narrative-sized bites. There's even the obligatory recap that's followed by the journalist character saying "We know all this already." You see this type thing all the time in the movies: character A explains to character B some background info that the audience needs to know but that character B should already know; the author then papers over the narrative mismatch by having character B object to the unnecessary sharing.

The informant's pleading to "get the story out" is a very efficient mechanism: (1) it adds more drama, (2) it lends a sort of fake credibility to the unnamed informant, and (3) it simultaneously solicits the reader to take action/forward the story/whatever.

Hilariously, notice how the author promises more at the end... "My source provided additional information, but I am abiding by his wish to get this much out... Stay tuned." Four days later, he's forgotten about it and has move on to his next agit-prop piece.

Vogtle was President/Chairman of Southern Company, Georgia Power's parent company. (Southern tends to name most of their plants after company bigwigs.) Apparently, he was a real POW who inspired the motorcycle dude in The Great Escape.