Niten

I got an early start in morse code thanks to my grandfather, who was a Navy radioman in World War II and later became a ham operator.

Sadly I never got my ham license, but it was my grandfather's obsession with radio which got me into electronics and, ultimately, software engineering. I still practice coding now and then, and morse is my go-to "hello world" for playing with new microcontrollers:

https://github.com/markshroyer/msp430-morse/blob/master/mors...

The aforementioned CERT guideline:

https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode...

Skeptics should note that the real-world example on that page is from the Linux kernel, where this style of goto is used heavily for error handling.

Not terribly plausible in kernel code.

Well it's not just a matter of bathrooms.

Even on a commuter bus or plane, if someone has a medical emergency and needs to get off right now, the bus will pull over or the plane will land. In this design you'd have to just sit there, helpless, until the vehicle reaches its destination. Heck, even if you're a doctor in the next seat you wouldn't be able to get up and help your fellow passenger.

> As a software engineer, I have to admit to being inspired by near-future software engineering fiction that explores new ideas, many of which are quite achievable.

What are some of your favorite examples of this genre?

> I dunno, my negative reaction to it isn't that the designer is breaking the limits of feasible materials and mechanical engineering...it's that, given no such limits, the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

My secondary negative reaction to this, though, is that I think there's a certain conceit in putting this design together and calling it the "iPhone 6". Whatever merits these drawings might have, they could be showcased just as well by making up an arbitrary new name for it and calling it an evolution in smartphone design in general — rather than hijack Apple's branding just to draw attention.

Python is almost a decade older than C#!

You could also put the LCARS panels from Star Trek: The Next Generation into this category.

More likely along the lines of other people not wanting to breathe your second-hand nicotine / whatever the hell else might be in this vapor, because the jury's still out on their safety.

Err... innovations in Bieber face swaps? Sorry, you lost me

EDIT: OK different link now... sure there is a Wikipedia article titled "Technological and industrial history of the United States". But that doesn't change the fact that, yes, the country's early technological growth was based heavily on the same sort of "piracy" that people love to hate modern Asia for.

Obviously a ton of great stuff has been created in the U.S. since then. All I'm saying is that if we're going to list countries for whom intellectual property theft has proven profitable, the U.S. belongs on that list just as sure as anyone else.

And the United States.

EDIT: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/piracy-and-fraud-pr...

Either you're intentionally misrepresenting my position or your reading comprehension needs serious help.

It's rather telling that when someone brands a given behavior as offensive, you imagine the discussion must stop there. That nobody else has the right to argue in the defense that, het, the 'perpetrator' has actually done nothing wrong in this specific case, and since one cannot rightfully insist that speakers no longer mention their significant others ever, the author really should get over this particular offense in order to function in the community at large.

If you think I have no right to say that, you would probably find yourself more comfortable on a private soapbox that in a discussion forum.

> As for your comment about me being oversensitive, way to miss the point of the last paragraph of my post.

I do get your notion of 1,000 paper cuts, or at least I think I do. But let me rephrase that – why should you consider my hypothetical complaint, as a heterosexual male, that my coincidentally female significant other doesn't "get" my interests in technology to be one of those cuts in the first place?

Before I was a programmer I worked in K-12 education, where females rather than males comprise the dominant population, so I think I have the experience to comment on this. There was some actual sexism that I faced there, as a male charged with watching over students. But for all of that, I never allowed myself to feel discomfort about the fact that most of my coworkers were female. Nor that when they complained about their significant others during our lunch breaks, those SOs happened to be overwhelmingly male. It was just something I had to get over.

> The intent of my blog posts (there's a few in the series) was to share my personal experiences and feelings. Not to explicitly label them as sexism or say everyone must share those feelings or say "hey you, you better go fix this" or any other number of things you seem to be attributing to it.

I grant that I may have missed the purpose of your posts (I will read them from the beginning), but when you call these things "paper cuts" it is implied that these are wrongs that have been done unto you, whether or not they fall into the subcategory of sexism. If they are indeed wrongs, then they need to be addressed so that other people do not suffer them as well. Or if they are not wrongs, then they are your own problem, and why complain about them publicly in the first place?

> The thing is, I've never heard a woman speaker make a similar joke about her husband/boyfriend or a non-heterosexual speaker make a similar comment about their partner.

Well, taking for granted the fact that there are more men than women in computer science and engineering / IT, presumably a higher percentage of women (and homosexual men) in tech have had success finding a significant other who shares their primary interests than vice-versa.

(Assuming you're the author of this blog) obviously much of what you mentioned in this post is flat-out sexism and needs to be addressed. But if I joke or complain that my $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER doesn't get my interests, and that $SIGNIFICANT_OTHER happens to be female makes you feel alienated... really, that's your problem. The fact that you have experienced actual sexism in some contexts is not mutually exclusive with the possibility that you are being oversensitive about this.

I'd say the exact opposite. This attempt to redefine the well-understood term "racism" into "something only white people can do" is a shameful maneuver to commandeer the societal reserves of moral outrage rightfully reserved for use against racial hatred, and redirect them so that racists who hate white people are immune. It is absolutely Orwellian.

Racial hatred is despicable in all forms. Those who push for such an artificial redefinition of racism would have us forget this.

I was really sad to hear this when our company evaluated Kiln a couple months ago. Off-site hosting is not an option for our company, so we had to go with another product despite strong user preferences for Kiln and FogBugz.

I hope a "firewall" install returns as an option someday, at which point we would eagerly reevaluate our choice...

Respectfully, you are flat out wrong. This "entropy check" doesn't prove what you think it does.

This password strength test is attempting to estimate the entropy of given passwords under the assumption that it is a word roughly obeying the character distributions of English text, using Shannon's approximation. It does not apply to randomly generated passwords, which violate these assumptions, as described in Appendex A of the NIST plublication linked on that very site.[1] As that document describes, the entropy of a randomly (not user!) selected password is not estimated in this manner, but calculated according to the same formula I provided: H = log_2 (b^L), where b is the number of letters in the alphabet (95) and L is the length of the password. (If the password had any less entropy than that, then by definition it would not have been pseudorandomly generated!)

Additionally, the algorithm employed by this site does not take into account that an intelligent password cracker is capable of exploiting the construction of passphrases.

In other words, you've taken an algorithm designed to approximate the entropy of a user-selected password and misapplied it to both randomly-generated passwords and user-selected passphrases. The fact that the algorithm is able to give you a number for these inputs does not mean it is any valid indication of how difficult such a password or passphrase would be to crack.

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-63/SP800-63V1...

EDIT: But you're right that passphrases can be easier to use by people. I personally think a password manager like keepass / lastpass / etc. is a better choice than trying to select a memorable password, though.

This is, again, not about a random password, as moxie explains in that thread. And as he continues, with regard to the comic: "I think that's totally on the right track, but if people start to do that, chances are that they'll start to create exploitable patterns again".

Any password cracker smart enough to exploit the patterns in "900gage!@#" is also smart enough to exploit the construction of an English language passphrase. The passphrase is still secure enough (probably), but it is not more secure than the random password. And if there is any one thing to take away from that thread, it should be that it's foolish to assume the obscurity of your passphrase's formulation gives you any extra security whatsoever.

That's not the case, though. Even knowing the general manner in which the passphrase is constructed, if the four words are randomly selected then the best an attacker can do is to brute force the space of 2^44 possible phrases, which is difficult enough to be considered secure. The very same can be said for the seven-character random password: the best an attacker can do, knowing how the password is constructed, is to brute-force a space of about 2^46 possible passwords, which is secure enough.

And this must be true in order for passphrases to be a reasonable choice. Because if people start using passphrases commonly, then this formulation will immediately be added to password cracking toolchains along with all the other common types of password.

On the other hand, the passphrases's actual "entropy" is probably lower than the advertised 44 bits, because patterns like the appearance of an adjective ("correct") before a noun ("horse") are common enough in the English language that they, too, could be factored into a smart password cracking tool.

Anyone using this comic to imply that a passphrase is more secure than a short random password hasn't done the math. This is comparing a passphrase drawn from four of the 2048 most common words against not a random password, but one based on a mutated version of one of the 65536 most common words.

The example passphrase does have the equivalent of 44 bits of entropy:

log_2 (2048^4) = 4 * 11 = 44

However, if we take a random password formed by just seven of the 95 printable ASCII characters, we already have a password four times stronger than such a passphrase:

log_2 (95^7) ≈ 45.99

XKCD is great and all, but I wish Randall had been more clear that this comparison does not touch on the strength of a random password, because I have since seen an infuriating number of people point to it to claim that passphrases are more secure than random passwords. They are not.

> Why would a Linux Pro mean kernel developer, while UNIX pro would be more generic?

Because Linux is technically the name of just the kernel, not the entire system encompassing userspace as well. There's definitely room for misinterpretation there.

As a non-EU citizen (USA), is there anything that I can do to help?

This article from last August hits the nail on the head with regard to systemd:

http://www.pappp.net/?p=969

"I’m not sure that this is a bad design, but it is most definitely not UNIX or anything like it."

To be more precise, I think the biggest problem with this anecdote is the notion that this guy somehow "one-upped" Knuth by coming up with a pragmatic rather than a theroetically optimal solution. Knuth is a mathematician after all, and if someone asks him to write a program they're implicitly asking for a mathematical result, not an unremarkable engineering tool.

So no, taking this anecdote at face value, this guy didn't "one-up" Knuth; they were effectively answering two different questions. There is more to computer science than finding the simplest shell script to solve the 80% case.

> Donald Knuth was asked to write a program to solve this text handling problem: read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies. He wrote a program consisting of more than ten pages of Pascal, designing (and documenting) a new algorithm along the way. Then, Doug McIlroy demonstrated a shell script that would easily fit within a Twitter post that solved the problem more simply, elegantly, and understandably (if you understand shell commands)

Fine anecdote, but anyone want to take a wager as to the relative time and space complexity of the two solutions? I imagine this is sort of comparing apples and oranges.

Well if you read through the post, especially Linus's follow-up comments, you'll find that his very point is this distinction between the truth of these technically correct, weasel-worded statements and the bigger picture.

Sentencing is ultimately up to the judge, and the truth is that Ortiz used the threat of "up to 35 years" to try to force a plea bargain. When Swartz refused a bargain which would have branded him a felon, as is his right, Ortiz's office drummed up additional charges.

Ortiz is likely technically correct when she says she never explicitly sought the maximum penalty for these extra charges she piled on. She is also deliberately evading the point by saying so, which is that her office absolutely threw the book at a kid for downloading some PDFs.

Imagine your kid comes home reeking of smoke. You ask him, anger in your voice, whether he was smoking with his buddies in the woods out back again. Kid cooly replies, "I wasn't smoking cigarettes."

Then you find a joint in his pocket. Kid was technically correct when he said he wasn't smoking cigarettes, but he was also "lying" in the sense that he sought to obfuscate and create a diversion from his wrongdoing by making such a statement.

You indulge in too many fallacies here to address individually, but since you bring healthcare into the discussion, the bottom line is that we know that government-run healthcare works. See: almost every other developed Western country, while the US system remains fundamentally broken.

You can engage in all the a priori pleading you like, but until you address that empirical, real-world fact there is no worthwhile argument to be had.

In case you didn't realize it, tax rates closer on par with other developed countries are a perfect solution to that problem.

It completely baffles me how any reasonable person could look at the retirement and health benefits situation in our country and come to the conclusion that our problem is being too generous to the working class.

Yes, the private sector has been much more effective than the public sector in collectively diminishing workers' wages and benefits in recent years. The logical conclusion is not that the public sector should do more to keep up with the downward spiral.