Anyone not living under a rock should at least have some general awareness of security related issues as it applies to our way of life. Most people will be very familiar with security related issues as it applies to the "real" world. For instance, most people will have locks on their doors, have cars that can be locked, some societies have burglar proofing in front of their windows, gates, alarm systems to detect intruders etc. Our lives are surrounded by measures meant to protect us from security exploits.
The same applies to the "virtual" world - in the electronic bits that flow through the copper and optical fibre and air veins of our digital networks. Just as there are real threats to our real world, we encounter virtual threats in our virtual world. Do note that I am not using the words real and virtual by their common meaning, virtual is no less real than real. It is just referring to existing digitally, as opposed to physically.
In the virtual world we encounter many security issues as well. Most people have heard of hacking, passwords, anti-virus, firewalls, HTTPS, encryption etc. All those concepts refer to protecting oneself from various security related exploits. These exploits do not (usually) attack us directly, but rather our digital presence and our information.
Modern IDEs help developers write code much quicker than ever before, autocompleting and auto-sensing a lot of what we want to do. Sometimes it generates code that needs to be changed due to the intent of the programmer that differs from the assumptions made by the IDE.
That said, when I see code like this I cannot help but ponder for a brief moment whether the developer just forgot to clean up the code generated by the IDE, or whether the developer intentionally placed the cookies on the table - ummm - I meant the break after the return:
switch (someType)
{
case A:
case B:
case C:
case D:
return false;
break; // <- WTF?
}
It is retarded. Why do people insist on writing:
boolean overwrite = check();
if (overwrite == true) {
doSomething();
}
when this does the same, requires less typing and is more natural to read:
When Charles Darwin came up with his incredible theory of evolution, he managed to explain a lot about where we came from and how we became the species we are now. So he answered the WHERE and HOW pretty darn well.
However there is one thing that he did not answer, and to the best of my knowledge has never been answered before. That is the WHY. In specific:
Why do cells want to survive and reproduce? What drives this need?