AP Computer Science is good as a programming class, but not as a computer science class. I am currently on my last year of my Bachelors in Computer Science degree at the University of Central Florida. I will be going to grad school after I graduate. As a bit of reference for those interested, here's my story when it comes to AP CS.
I took the AP Computer Science in High School while it was still offered in C++. There were basically two components - the language and the case study. The case study (at that time, the AP Fish case study, a good case study - certainly better than the BigInt case study) was valuable for seeing how a very small project could be assembled and how things could work together to make a decent object oriented model. I learned much from it. Also in the curriculum was a study of data structures. Namely, we studied arrays, matrices, linked list, binary trees, binary search trees, stacks, queues, and hash tables, and had to produce working examples of these data structures. We also had very basic algorithms: linear search, binary search, bubble sort, insertion sort, selection sort, and quick sort. After studying for the exam, I easily got a 5 on the AP exam.
When I got to UCF, the School of Engineering and Computer Science would not honor my AP credit, regardless of my score on the AP exam. So they dumped me into an introductory programming class and an object oriented design class my first semester, along with a class in finite mathematics and a data structures/algorithm class. I have to say, the material that was covered in that one year was much more comprehensive, engaging, and enlightening than anything that the AP class had taught me. Of course, they had time to be - I was taking four classes, and all computer science classes for four months.
I suppose what I'm trying to say to people that put kids in AP CS thinking that it will cause them to skip a few classes in college are doing a real disservice to these kids. The programming experience is invaluable, and I suggest that all high school kids download the case study and materials (which were freely available at the College Board) website and see what you can do with it, and see how it's put together. Then maybe borrow a book about computer science from the local library or look a few things up on the web to learn about the algorithms that it uses. If you're going into computer science, take the class, but also take the intro classes at the university you go to. At worst, it will be review, and at best, you'll understand things quite well. Also, don't forget to get out and enjoy your time in high school, and be sure to enjoy yourself in college. Don't be a CS shut-in - go out and take in everything that your university has to offer, doubly so if it's free.
In my four years at UCF, I have a 4.0 in all computer science and math classes, and have learned a lot in the process.
There's a really good guide at http://www.weethet.nl/english/tivo_dtv2_hacksleepe r.php. I was just looking at it last night, and it's quite complete. I have a Series 2 Standalone TiVo, and plan on upping the hard drive space and installing a hack to extract video unencrypted.
it does offer better sound than MP3 at a given bitrate
Unless you're like me and have double blind tests that show that LAME sounds better. Of course, this is to my ears, but your milage may vary. Just because something has a more complex format doesn't necessarily mean that it's "better quality" at a lower bitrate.
I think that you're reading your own bias into this. I never say anywhere that the government must set standards of right and wrong and that they should be applied to anyone who wants to play video games or read books, or anything of the sort. I'm arguing the contrary - that the government should not set these standards and that the motivation behind the standards, namely, that violent video games cause violence in the population in general, is flawed. Though I do admit that for some people who don't know the difference between fantasy and reality, violent behavior may happen as a result of exposure to video games. This is not a problem that a government solution will fix. This is a problem that only private industry can fix.
(practically flamebait, but I'll bite...) See my reply to the other comment. I address most of these issues. I never say the government knows what's right or wrong. What I do say is that well adjusted adults can tell the difference between right and wrong, and furthermore, that well adjusted adults can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem is, some children and a number of adults cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. This is not the fault of violent video games. People who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality have been influenced by any number of things, none of which, I feel, the government should censor. Media corporations (by which I mean media conglomerates) rely on people not being able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. These would be the "people that are really messed up" as you would say, though for the purposes of this discussion, we should refer to them as not as socially adjusted as those who know the difference between fantasy and reality. This is the issue that we need to understand and address.
As far as violent video games go, if the government is worried about people re-enacting them, then they should spend the time and the money addressing this issue. I'm not saying that the government should "educate" people by indoctrination, but I am saying that directing those who do not know the difference between fantasy and reality to qualified therapists is a good start.
Of course, none of this will happen because media corporations, propaganda, and political grandstanding rely on a populace that's willing to dream the impossible dream and live in a fantasy world. In other words, government hypocrisy will block this. Nothing to see here...
So, in other words, the government shouldn't have any laws against murder, and instead parents should be able to decide on a case by case basis if murder is wrong? I don't believe the government should be moral police. There are a few things that most moral codes agree are bad: rape, murder, unprovoked assault, and so forth.
I agree that parents should be allowed to control what video games their children play. If you look at my post, nowhere do I say that the government should ban video games or restrict their sale. What I do say is that people that don't know the difference between right and wrong and fantasy and reality are the problem, not the video games.
Perhaps if the government would direct those that need help distinguishing fantasy from reality to people who can help them, then this problem would be dramatically lessened. However, entertainment companies rely on people that don't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Concepts such as "true love conquers all", "you too could be a winner", and "reality television" are all fields where entertainment companies make their bread and butter. In the gross majority of cases, the reverse of all of those concepts are true.
Perhaps instead of banning video games, governments should be focused on educating people between the differences between right and wrong and fantasy and reality. There are studies that show people who don't know the difference between right and wrong and people that don't know the difference between fantasy and reality can be influenced to violent behavior by violent video games. What most of these studies fail to mention is the numbers of people who have been affected by other media outlets and how that compares to video games. In the past, Dungeons & Dragons, Saturday Cartoons, Comic Books, Movies, Heavy Metal Music, and Dime Store Novels were all thought to have the same influence. So the question becomes, is the problem with the media or the people consuming the media?
Or perhaps if people knew the difference between fantasy and reality, fewer people would go see movies and watch television and begin to wake from their unrealistic dreams?
It is very possible that these people can be very creative or smart and are in a temporary rut. Or it is also possible that they have somekind of illness like bipolar or manic depression, which is treatable.
Let us not forget that Alan Turing committed suicide after he was outed one of his lovers. Very few in the CS would would argue that he wasn't smart and creative.
The Hushmail service uses PGP and allows you to encrypt your messages with PGP and recieve PGP encrypted and signed messages. Be sure to pick a good passphrase!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - news anchor Peter Jennings was found dead in his New York City home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly a Canadian icon.
Given people's obsession with finding out the secrets of the PS2 and the PS3 and given the lucrative market, I'm sure that GameShark or ActionReplay will come out with a device or software to do this migration for you. For example, a version of the SharkPort that works on the PS2 to take the games from it and move them to the PS3.
Just because Sony won't support this in the console doesn't mean that it won't be supported by third parties.
I honestly wish you could do a "block sender" in newsgroups. Really, it would make usenet a little bit more bearable. But all the blocking features seem to be reserved for email.
That's what a killfile is for. Most newsreaders already support killfiles, and most newsreaders grow to the point where they support killfiles.
After all of the package breakage is sorted out and it's been at least 14 days, then these packages will find their way into testing ('etch') if there are no critical bugs. You can check the status of this in the "excuses file" located on Debian's FTP site.
Intel went out of their way to make their compiler not work with AMD processors, which raises a problem.
If you tell this to somebody that uses compilers on a daily basis (developers, etc), then they'll care, but if you take the average person and tell them this, their response will be, "It's Intel's compiler, and they can program it to do whatever they see fit. It's their piece of software and nobody forces you to use it."
Intel went out of their way to make their compiler not work with AMD processors, which raises a problem.
Again, look at my car analogy above. While it is not a perfect mapping, car manufacturers go out of their way to make their parts only work on their particular cars, and if you do get another manufacturer's part to work, you may have substandard results. The same is true with compilers. Intel makes a compiler that works wonderfully well if you are using their chips, and spits out substandard results when using other chips. There's a simple fix - use a different compiler.
This is a jury trial anyways so the legality of this is not as important as the "Intel are assholes" factor that it will have on the jury.
I agree. It is Intel's software, and they can make it do whatever they please. They could make their compiler implement the "halt and catch fire" instruction if they want. They can make it spit out alternate code paths in PPC if they'd like. They can make the error messages spit out in Swedish Chef dialect. It's their code, and they can do with it what they want. If developers do not like it, then they should give their support to other compiler makers. AMD should not be using this as ammo in their lawsuit because it is irrelevant.
The problem is that Intel does NOT have a monopoly on chips, as is shown by AMD and other chip making companies. Because of that, your argument falls flat.
Then take this to a complete extreme - you don't have control over the implementation details of underlying hardware. What's to say that the underlying hardware can't backdoor your program either? At some point, you have to be able to trust something, or build your own computers from scratch.
I agree with absolutely everything that you just posted, but it's all beside the point. At this point, compilers are a commodity. You have Intel's compiler, Microsoft's compiler, Borland's compiler, gcc, and probably many more that I have forgotten to list. They all have varying support for optimizations for Intel and AMD chips, and one of them (the Intel one) actively goes out of their way to be slower on AMD chips. What is the solution to this problem? Use a different compiler.
To use your car analogy, if I have an engine that's built for a Ford Explorer and decide that, for reasons not important, I want to use this engine in my Chevy Suburban. In this case, we treat the engine as the compiler and the vehicle as the underlying hardware. Now, Ford may go out of their way to make it so their engine does not work in my vehicle. If I succeed in getting this engine working in my Suburban, do I have a cause of action when I don't get the same performance out of my vehicle? Certainly not because the Ford engine was designed for a Ford product, not the product that I want to use it in. The engine of the Ford product might support things that both vehicles do, but in a different way because they're implemented in a different way in the underlying vehicle.
Do I think what Intel is doing is wrong? Yes. Do I think it should be the subject of a lawsuit? Certainly not.
So you wrote a new compiler to get around that? Great. How're you planning on compiling it?
Using the compiler. The C compiler of which you speak only recognized itself and the kernel - any other code that you compiled was not affected, which means that a compiler that you wrote from scratch would not be affected by this back door.
Speaking as somebody who has watched the entire Sailor Moon series in Japanese, there are parts that are very family-friendly, but as a whole, the series is more for the mature crowd. In the third season, they're looking for a messiah and the holy grail, even though the bastarized dub changes these terms to be more PC. The fifth season is pretty violent (not in the same league as DBZ, but close) and is more for mature audiences.
That being said, if you want to see Sailor Moon the way it was meant to be seen, pickup the uncensored first and second season box sets. They are in Japanese with English subtitles. Everything after that is uncut and includes the subtitles, and the godawful dubs.
You can connect the line out of a tape deck to the line in of your computer and use any tool that allows you to record from line in (for example, sox on Unix or Sound Recorder on Windows). ThinkGeek also has a drive for this.
Once it is in your computer, editing, cleaning, and splitting tracks can be done with Audacity, which is covered under the GPL. I've used this to convert several tapes and LPs to CD and MP3, and it works quite well.
If you're looking to program software for it, the obvious places to start would be the audiofile library, and perhaps libao for playback, but I haven't found this necessary.
The fact that it undeniably is (in some environments) doesn't mean that people are stupid for not knowing which e-mails to leave closed, it means that e-mail is broken for many millions of users.
No, email is just fine for users. The broken part is the user agent that gets exploited. No e-mail client is safe, but if there were ways to lockdown Outlook beyond "swiss cheese", then many of these worms would vanish. The reason that they are programmed in the first place is due to the popularity of Windows, Outlook Express, and Outlook, and that many of the settings are almost insecure by default.
For example, I use Gmail. Opening an email for me has never triggered a virus or spyware installation for me, and, assuming that my web brower and operating system are locked down, never should be able to.
Furthermore, not educating users that their software might have these exploits is planning for failure. You talk about how it's not the stupidity of human beings for the problems of the software and the email program. I disagree. I believe that it's mostly a human problem. If you tell somebody that their email client may be prone to attack and that they shouldn't open email attachments and links from people that they don't know, and they do it anyway, then it is indeed human stupidity that has caused your breech of security. Social engineering (and emails that purport to show you naked celebrities are just this) is the lowest-tech form of compromising security and the only way that it can be prevented is through education. In this case, it is not the SMTP, IMAP, or POP3 protocols being exploited. It's the gullibility of users.
We shouldn't get cracking on Email 2.0. Instead we should work on a patch to Human Being 1.0 where we inform our users why their machine goes down when they open attachments and links from people they don't know. The maybe we should have meetings about this protocol and retraining and seminars for users. It can't be any more expensive than the cost of an email worm running rampant through your infrastructure, can it?
I'd hesitate to call any Miyazaki film "anime". While they certainly have many elements that anime has, they are much more than just anime. Every Miyazaki film I have seen has been good. While the anime "trend" may not continue to be popular in the United States for ever, the appeal of a good story is universal, and, as such, Miyazaki's films will still be popular after all of the anime series stop playing in the after-school, Saturday morning, and Cartoon Network rotations.
What Pixar and Miyazaki prove is that it's the story first. Only when you have a good, compelling story should you start looking at "implementation details".
Slashdot Mirror
AP Computer Science is good as a programming class, but not as a computer science class. I am currently on my last year of my Bachelors in Computer Science degree at the University of Central Florida. I will be going to grad school after I graduate. As a bit of reference for those interested, here's my story when it comes to AP CS.
I took the AP Computer Science in High School while it was still offered in C++. There were basically two components - the language and the case study. The case study (at that time, the AP Fish case study, a good case study - certainly better than the BigInt case study) was valuable for seeing how a very small project could be assembled and how things could work together to make a decent object oriented model. I learned much from it. Also in the curriculum was a study of data structures. Namely, we studied arrays, matrices, linked list, binary trees, binary search trees, stacks, queues, and hash tables, and had to produce working examples of these data structures. We also had very basic algorithms: linear search, binary search, bubble sort, insertion sort, selection sort, and quick sort. After studying for the exam, I easily got a 5 on the AP exam.
When I got to UCF, the School of Engineering and Computer Science would not honor my AP credit, regardless of my score on the AP exam. So they dumped me into an introductory programming class and an object oriented design class my first semester, along with a class in finite mathematics and a data structures/algorithm class. I have to say, the material that was covered in that one year was much more comprehensive, engaging, and enlightening than anything that the AP class had taught me. Of course, they had time to be - I was taking four classes, and all computer science classes for four months.
I suppose what I'm trying to say to people that put kids in AP CS thinking that it will cause them to skip a few classes in college are doing a real disservice to these kids. The programming experience is invaluable, and I suggest that all high school kids download the case study and materials (which were freely available at the College Board) website and see what you can do with it, and see how it's put together. Then maybe borrow a book about computer science from the local library or look a few things up on the web to learn about the algorithms that it uses. If you're going into computer science, take the class, but also take the intro classes at the university you go to. At worst, it will be review, and at best, you'll understand things quite well. Also, don't forget to get out and enjoy your time in high school, and be sure to enjoy yourself in college. Don't be a CS shut-in - go out and take in everything that your university has to offer, doubly so if it's free.
In my four years at UCF, I have a 4.0 in all computer science and math classes, and have learned a lot in the process.
There's a really good guide at http://www.weethet.nl/english/tivo_dtv2_hacksleepe r.php. I was just looking at it last night, and it's quite complete. I have a Series 2 Standalone TiVo, and plan on upping the hard drive space and installing a hack to extract video unencrypted.
it does offer better sound than MP3 at a given bitrate
Unless you're like me and have double blind tests that show that LAME sounds better. Of course, this is to my ears, but your milage may vary. Just because something has a more complex format doesn't necessarily mean that it's "better quality" at a lower bitrate.
I think that you're reading your own bias into this. I never say anywhere that the government must set standards of right and wrong and that they should be applied to anyone who wants to play video games or read books, or anything of the sort. I'm arguing the contrary - that the government should not set these standards and that the motivation behind the standards, namely, that violent video games cause violence in the population in general, is flawed. Though I do admit that for some people who don't know the difference between fantasy and reality, violent behavior may happen as a result of exposure to video games. This is not a problem that a government solution will fix. This is a problem that only private industry can fix.
(practically flamebait, but I'll bite...)
See my reply to the other comment. I address most of these issues. I never say the government knows what's right or wrong. What I do say is that well adjusted adults can tell the difference between right and wrong, and furthermore, that well adjusted adults can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem is, some children and a number of adults cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. This is not the fault of violent video games. People who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality have been influenced by any number of things, none of which, I feel, the government should censor. Media corporations (by which I mean media conglomerates) rely on people not being able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. These would be the "people that are really messed up" as you would say, though for the purposes of this discussion, we should refer to them as not as socially adjusted as those who know the difference between fantasy and reality. This is the issue that we need to understand and address.
As far as violent video games go, if the government is worried about people re-enacting them, then they should spend the time and the money addressing this issue. I'm not saying that the government should "educate" people by indoctrination, but I am saying that directing those who do not know the difference between fantasy and reality to qualified therapists is a good start.
Of course, none of this will happen because media corporations, propaganda, and political grandstanding rely on a populace that's willing to dream the impossible dream and live in a fantasy world. In other words, government hypocrisy will block this. Nothing to see here...
So, in other words, the government shouldn't have any laws against murder, and instead parents should be able to decide on a case by case basis if murder is wrong? I don't believe the government should be moral police. There are a few things that most moral codes agree are bad: rape, murder, unprovoked assault, and so forth.
I agree that parents should be allowed to control what video games their children play. If you look at my post, nowhere do I say that the government should ban video games or restrict their sale. What I do say is that people that don't know the difference between right and wrong and fantasy and reality are the problem, not the video games.
Perhaps if the government would direct those that need help distinguishing fantasy from reality to people who can help them, then this problem would be dramatically lessened. However, entertainment companies rely on people that don't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Concepts such as "true love conquers all", "you too could be a winner", and "reality television" are all fields where entertainment companies make their bread and butter. In the gross majority of cases, the reverse of all of those concepts are true.
Perhaps instead of banning video games, governments should be focused on educating people between the differences between right and wrong and fantasy and reality. There are studies that show people who don't know the difference between right and wrong and people that don't know the difference between fantasy and reality can be influenced to violent behavior by violent video games. What most of these studies fail to mention is the numbers of people who have been affected by other media outlets and how that compares to video games. In the past, Dungeons & Dragons, Saturday Cartoons, Comic Books, Movies, Heavy Metal Music, and Dime Store Novels were all thought to have the same influence. So the question becomes, is the problem with the media or the people consuming the media?
Or perhaps if people knew the difference between fantasy and reality, fewer people would go see movies and watch television and begin to wake from their unrealistic dreams?
It is very possible that these people can be very creative or smart and are in a temporary rut. Or it is also possible that they have somekind of illness like bipolar or manic depression, which is treatable.
Let us not forget that Alan Turing committed suicide after he was outed one of his lovers. Very few in the CS would would argue that he wasn't smart and creative.
AllOfMP3 does this. You can get music from them in Ogg or MP3 format for most of their albums, and FLAC for some of the albums.
http://www.allofmp3.com/
The Hushmail service uses PGP and allows you to encrypt your messages with PGP and recieve PGP encrypted and signed messages. Be sure to pick a good passphrase!
1 Terabyte? Now that's just crazy talk!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - news anchor Peter Jennings was found dead in his New York City home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly a Canadian icon.
Given people's obsession with finding out the secrets of the PS2 and the PS3 and given the lucrative market, I'm sure that GameShark or ActionReplay will come out with a device or software to do this migration for you. For example, a version of the SharkPort that works on the PS2 to take the games from it and move them to the PS3.
Just because Sony won't support this in the console doesn't mean that it won't be supported by third parties.
I honestly wish you could do a "block sender" in newsgroups. Really, it would make usenet a little bit more bearable. But all the blocking features seem to be reserved for email.
That's what a killfile is for. Most newsreaders already support killfiles, and most newsreaders grow to the point where they support killfiles.
After all of the package breakage is sorted out and it's been at least 14 days, then these packages will find their way into testing ('etch') if there are no critical bugs. You can check the status of this in the "excuses file" located on Debian's FTP site.
Intel went out of their way to make their compiler not work with AMD processors, which raises a problem.
If you tell this to somebody that uses compilers on a daily basis (developers, etc), then they'll care, but if you take the average person and tell them this, their response will be, "It's Intel's compiler, and they can program it to do whatever they see fit. It's their piece of software and nobody forces you to use it."
Intel went out of their way to make their compiler not work with AMD processors, which raises a problem.
Again, look at my car analogy above. While it is not a perfect mapping, car manufacturers go out of their way to make their parts only work on their particular cars, and if you do get another manufacturer's part to work, you may have substandard results. The same is true with compilers. Intel makes a compiler that works wonderfully well if you are using their chips, and spits out substandard results when using other chips. There's a simple fix - use a different compiler.
This is a jury trial anyways so the legality of this is not as important as the "Intel are assholes" factor that it will have on the jury.
I agree. It is Intel's software, and they can make it do whatever they please. They could make their compiler implement the "halt and catch fire" instruction if they want. They can make it spit out alternate code paths in PPC if they'd like. They can make the error messages spit out in Swedish Chef dialect. It's their code, and they can do with it what they want. If developers do not like it, then they should give their support to other compiler makers. AMD should not be using this as ammo in their lawsuit because it is irrelevant.
The problem is that Intel does NOT have a monopoly on chips, as is shown by AMD and other chip making companies. Because of that, your argument falls flat.
Then take this to a complete extreme - you don't have control over the implementation details of underlying hardware. What's to say that the underlying hardware can't backdoor your program either? At some point, you have to be able to trust something, or build your own computers from scratch.
I agree with absolutely everything that you just posted, but it's all beside the point. At this point, compilers are a commodity. You have Intel's compiler, Microsoft's compiler, Borland's compiler, gcc, and probably many more that I have forgotten to list. They all have varying support for optimizations for Intel and AMD chips, and one of them (the Intel one) actively goes out of their way to be slower on AMD chips. What is the solution to this problem? Use a different compiler.
To use your car analogy, if I have an engine that's built for a Ford Explorer and decide that, for reasons not important, I want to use this engine in my Chevy Suburban. In this case, we treat the engine as the compiler and the vehicle as the underlying hardware. Now, Ford may go out of their way to make it so their engine does not work in my vehicle. If I succeed in getting this engine working in my Suburban, do I have a cause of action when I don't get the same performance out of my vehicle? Certainly not because the Ford engine was designed for a Ford product, not the product that I want to use it in. The engine of the Ford product might support things that both vehicles do, but in a different way because they're implemented in a different way in the underlying vehicle.
Do I think what Intel is doing is wrong? Yes. Do I think it should be the subject of a lawsuit? Certainly not.
So you wrote a new compiler to get around that? Great. How're you planning on compiling it?
Using the compiler. The C compiler of which you speak only recognized itself and the kernel - any other code that you compiled was not affected, which means that a compiler that you wrote from scratch would not be affected by this back door.
Speaking as somebody who has watched the entire Sailor Moon series in Japanese, there are parts that are very family-friendly, but as a whole, the series is more for the mature crowd. In the third season, they're looking for a messiah and the holy grail, even though the bastarized dub changes these terms to be more PC. The fifth season is pretty violent (not in the same league as DBZ, but close) and is more for mature audiences.
That being said, if you want to see Sailor Moon the way it was meant to be seen, pickup the uncensored first and second season box sets. They are in Japanese with English subtitles. Everything after that is uncut and includes the subtitles, and the godawful dubs.
You can connect the line out of a tape deck to the line in of your computer and use any tool that allows you to record from line in (for example, sox on Unix or Sound Recorder on Windows). ThinkGeek also has a drive for this.
Once it is in your computer, editing, cleaning, and splitting tracks can be done with Audacity, which is covered under the GPL. I've used this to convert several tapes and LPs to CD and MP3, and it works quite well.
If you're looking to program software for it, the obvious places to start would be the audiofile library, and perhaps libao for playback, but I haven't found this necessary.
The fact that it undeniably is (in some environments) doesn't mean that people are stupid for not knowing which e-mails to leave closed, it means that e-mail is broken for many millions of users.
No, email is just fine for users. The broken part is the user agent that gets exploited. No e-mail client is safe, but if there were ways to lockdown Outlook beyond "swiss cheese", then many of these worms would vanish. The reason that they are programmed in the first place is due to the popularity of Windows, Outlook Express, and Outlook, and that many of the settings are almost insecure by default.
For example, I use Gmail. Opening an email for me has never triggered a virus or spyware installation for me, and, assuming that my web brower and operating system are locked down, never should be able to.
Furthermore, not educating users that their software might have these exploits is planning for failure. You talk about how it's not the stupidity of human beings for the problems of the software and the email program. I disagree. I believe that it's mostly a human problem. If you tell somebody that their email client may be prone to attack and that they shouldn't open email attachments and links from people that they don't know, and they do it anyway, then it is indeed human stupidity that has caused your breech of security. Social engineering (and emails that purport to show you naked celebrities are just this) is the lowest-tech form of compromising security and the only way that it can be prevented is through education. In this case, it is not the SMTP, IMAP, or POP3 protocols being exploited. It's the gullibility of users.
We shouldn't get cracking on Email 2.0. Instead we should work on a patch to Human Being 1.0 where we inform our users why their machine goes down when they open attachments and links from people they don't know. The maybe we should have meetings about this protocol and retraining and seminars for users. It can't be any more expensive than the cost of an email worm running rampant through your infrastructure, can it?
I'd hesitate to call any Miyazaki film "anime". While they certainly have many elements that anime has, they are much more than just anime. Every Miyazaki film I have seen has been good. While the anime "trend" may not continue to be popular in the United States for ever, the appeal of a good story is universal, and, as such, Miyazaki's films will still be popular after all of the anime series stop playing in the after-school, Saturday morning, and Cartoon Network rotations.
What Pixar and Miyazaki prove is that it's the story first. Only when you have a good, compelling story should you start looking at "implementation details".
That noise you hear is the sound of the joke streaking over your head.