In many modern languages, encoding errors are the number one cause of security flaws in software.

This is going to be long because if you don't have a deep understanding about what is going on, you too will write encoding-based security flaws. Given the widespread state of ignorance about this situation, including a large number of people who don't even believe there is a problem, I do not believe I can make this much shorter.

But before I can discuss any sort of solution, what exactly is the problem? Let us start with a parable.

One of the little games I play with my spam is waiting for their incredibly bad random name schemes to come up with a name I actually recognize. Today I've had the closest hit yet: "Charles Brown", who, tragically, has turned to the Nigerian scam to fund his kite habit.

Oh, kite-eating tree, how low you have brought him.

U.S. consumer prices were unexpectedly flat last month - Wall Street Journal

Is it just me, or is every bit of economic news lately being prefaced with "unexpectedly"?

Is it just me, or has prediction gotten noticeably harder in the last year or so? Maybe I'm just paying attention more, but you name the prediction from this time last year, from the state of Iraq, to the economy, to the domestic political situation, and not a one of them is even close.

If this article really demonstrates anything, it's the need for an independent press.

If you're dependent on the entities you are reporting on to get your news about those entities, you not independent. Levels of independence vary along a continuum, but most organizations are deep in "dependent" territory.

Commercial journalism has made its peace with this, because they get eyeballs whether they spend the money to pound the pavement, or just re-run press releases and report on what everybody else reports on. I see no way to fix this.

In one example that might be considered Political Correctness Gone Mad, the name of the county in which Seattle, WA sits in was changed in 2005 from King county (named after William King, vice president of the US at the time of the county's inception), to King county (named after Martin Luther King Jr., who visited Seattle in 1961.) - Please Select New City Name (tvtropes)

It's going to be an interesting Presidential campaign, no matter what. All plausible candidates have glaring flaws in them.

The idea of the Lincoln-Douglas debates are deeply ingrained in the American psyche, but I think it's time to face up to the fact that that era of the debate has passed.

Instead, I wish the candidates would do a written debate. I don't just mean "Send them each a bunch of questions and publish both responses", I mean an interactive series of answers and rebuttals. Randomly choose half the questions to send to the one candidate first, half to the other. Set some word limit. (And if were up to me, I'd tell the candidates that it's a hard word limit; send me 600 words instead of 500 if you like, but I'll just cut you off mid-sentence...) Stop at two or three iterations. In the internet era, I'd give them as many hyperlinks as they wanted and not count them against their word count, and invite the candidates to continue after the official debate on their own websites, if they like, giving both of them the last word.

And here's a fascinating article on children and lying; why they lie, where it comes from, and all based on real science, not pop science. Most interestingly, it compares the reactions of parents to the lies and how that can affect the child.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.

This puts parents in the position of being either damned or blessed, depending on how they choose to look at it. If your 4-year-old is a good liar, it’s a strong sign she’s got brains. And it’s the smart, savvy kid who’s most at risk of becoming a habitual liar.

A truly awesome article about computer science meeting social science via cellular automata-based simulations in The Atlantic.

...

OK, this defies pull-quoting. Just read it.

(Also: If you're a programmer, it's really easy to set these simulations up and play away; the claim that this requires "sophisticated modern programming languages" is basically false, it's just modern languages make this really, really easy. I'm sure there are tools for these things, but I'm not sure they're really necessary...)

Shamus posted a challenge, which went (in part):

I enjoyed the discussion the other day on the various uses and uselessness of super abilities. It is surprisingly difficult to benefit the world, even when you wield fantastic powers. Imagine if you were granted the following:

• Incredible strength....
• You can fly....
• You are functionally indestructible....

...I’m annoyed at how useless I would be, in the big scheme of things. I couldn’t solve any of the world’s major problems. I couldn’t even solve the small ones.... [more interesting discussion]