As soon as they can guarantee all government services will work.

Sell.

My first real programming project was a DOS TSR keylogger. When you start your programming journey in the computer underground: 1) you have no idea the magnitude of the problems being thrown around by your peers, everything is trivialized and you're expected to know a great deal of info about the inner workings of your programming languages and their execution model, application software, OS/kernel internals, compilers, network, hardware, file formats and .. bugs and 2) there is an absolute joy to everything you do; never underestimate the power of mischief as a great motivator.

I don't expect you to dawn a blackhat at this stage, you're probably too mature, and the scene is pretty much lame nowadays anyway. What you can do however is join a community that enjoys and fosters a healthy hacking attitude. Something very geeky and very focused, like the demo scene (if they're still as innovative as they used to be.) You need a group of friends, all of whom are hacking for fun and giving each other feedback. IRC is an excellent place to find such people. Something focused on a given subject and a given technology. Start with your favorite libraries and join their IRC channels. The Allegro game library scene was cool, write 2D games for fun. Once you master the basic usage of the library, you will see what more experienced people have done with it. There is a different, unique taste to seeing a master craftsman make something great out of the ordinary ("wow, he did that in 4k" or "wow, fake 3D".) This will motivate you to no end :-)

Take out the manual of your "battery included" language of choice (Python, PLT or Chicken Scheme) and step through the module list. Write small programs that use each module/library and pretty soon you will have tons of ideas. Just take a GUI library, a network library, a regex parser, a mime/XML/html parser, and an audio library; taken into any combination, you will have something that solves an interesting problem. Something as "big" as a web server can be written with just the system calls built into every unix :-)

Finding your own problems, to keep you busy, is also something you will eventually develop as you continue hacking.

P.S. DON'T start with a janitorial position cleaning up other people's code or doing manuals, as the "Hacker HOWTO" advocates. Fuck that, NIH and all, go out there and create your own bugs to fix. Have fun, eh? :-)

Sorry, but that's wrong. If two people have read a book and disagree about the meaning of a given section, then it's perfectly reasonable to expect both sides to be dispassionate as they dissect the passage in question. But what Chomsky is saying (in the context of this article) is that it makes him angry when people disagree with his interpretations of books they haven't read.

When you say scholars should be dispassionate about this, you're basically saying that a book review written by someone who hasn't read the book should be treated with equal respect as a book review written by someone who has. This seems profoundly anti-intellectual to me.

This was proposed by Meglena Kuneva, the consumer protection comissioner for the EU. I attended a talk she gave in Harvard. While she seems dedicated to her work she often blames companies for consumers' lack of judgment. For example, she blamed Apple for corrupting the youth with iPods.

Never attribute to cunning that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

This is almost sort of reasonable, until

>According to Mingorance, the proposed regulatory extension would cover all software, including beta products, and would cover both proprietary and open-source software.

So I'm now liable for that project I wrote in one night for myself that I released under the MIT License if anyone from the EU finds it, uses it, and runs into some security hole?

That's going lead to a whole new brand of licenses that say, "Anyone may use this, unless you're in the EU, in which case I can't handle the liability. Sorry, your parliament sucks."

In fact, I would argue that this law would void open source licenses in the EU anyway.

From the MIT License:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Doesn't that imply that the software can't be used anywhere where a warranty is mandatory? The license states that there's no warranty, so you're violating the license by having a required warranty.