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Comment Re:Every SSD WIFI Password ? (Score 2) 487

Thank you for being a friend,
And sharing WiFi passwords there and back again.
You're giving me the WiFi key of your favorite restaurant.

And if they came to your dorm,
Invited everyone you knew,
You would see the ugly guy at the back downloading kiddie porn,
And the FBI would raid you singing "Thank you for filling our jail!"

Comment Re:No (Score 4, Informative) 487

Inflammatory Mode On: Why in the fuck would even want to opt-in to such a service? If it's private WiFi, it's likely to be at my home or my workplace, and in either case I absolutely do not ever want to share that over fucking Fuckbook, Twatter or whatever stupid lame-ass soshial neshworking crap site becomes the next biggest and greatest.

Rational Mode On: Now let's imagine that my organization has a private WiFi hotspot available for employees and a few others. I do not ever want to have those keys shared outside that group, nor should I have to change MY network with an "_optout" on the end of an SSID. I would consider that a breach of security. Sure, I'll probably be able to disable Windows devices that are domain members via GPO, but if they're not actually devices belonging to the organization, or "Pro" versions of Windows where it even knows what the hell Active Directory is, then MY network is being compromised by this service.

This is just a plain bad idea, whether you're being reasonable or inflammatory.

Comment Speed is indeed important (Score 1) 6

Not everyone has a brand-new computer; The manuscript of the book I'm about to publish is in Open Office Word, about 400 pages and full of large images, and autosave is a real pain because it takes minutes to save the file.

Like another commenter said, I wouldn't make it the most important thing, overall efficiency is. But software speed is important to anyone with an older computer, especially a Windows computer, because the computer slows as the registry grows, and the registry never gets smaller, only bigger.

Comment Re: Altough I agree (Score 1) 61

Also consider that in most markets, Windows Phone is closer in phone marketshare to iOS than iOS is to Android. That's not saying a lot. But WP is definitely at the #3 spot, and the way this market is... if they can find that itch to scratch, things could change within the course of two or three years.

Which is like bragging about Pluto because it's closer to the Sun than to Proxima Centauri.

Third place in the mobile market is a dubious distinction, at best. In reality, Windows phones are irrelevant, but only slightly less irrelevant than, say, BlackBerry.

Comment Re:C# Java; MSFT Oracle (Score 1) 181

Because moving from one proprietary language/library ecosystem to another proprietary language/library ecosystem is somehow an improvement.

Fuck them both. We have truly open ecosystems like C++, and I would encourage any sensible developer going forward to move away from the likes of Java and the .NET ecosystems, now that the Supreme Court has essentially turned them into perpetual litigation machines.

Comment Re:Fucking Lawyers (Score 1) 181

But cleanroom implementations are meaningless if copyright can be asserted over the API. Clean room implementations only work because it has been generally understood that an API itself is essentially a directory listing, like a phone book, that in and of itself does not constitute some sort of creative work. Before the Oracle case, it was assumed that it was the code itself that constituted the intellectual property. But that is now apparently no longer true, and thus the Win32 API has gained the same level of protection as the source code.

If this stands, and is not corrected either by a lower court or by Congress, no one will every try a clean room implementation of any non-free library again, because there's a real likelihood that you would find yourself sued into oblivion for breach of copyright.

Wine may be safe because MS is being constrained by future potential anti-competitive suits, and of course Samba is protected because of a deal cut with the EU. But from this day foreward, clean room implementation of proprietary APIs, and I assume any other software spec (document format, communications protocol, etc.) will have absolutely no protection under the law.

Comment Re: Oracle is GPLd now, then. (Score 1) 181

It certainly is looking that way, but there is the whole notion that what amount to call tables can be copyrighted. What the supreme Court has done here is basically unravel the common understanding of the difference between spec and implementation, and if Java is the most obviously vulnerable, in a very real way it means any number of APIs that have been re-implemented (like the standard *nix set of system calls) could suddenly be plunged into a purgatory-like nether world. I made vulgar jokes about using stdio.h in C programs, but that's the real question. Considering that in many cases header files and libraries whose origins go back decades in many different languages and on many different architectures could become low-hanging fruit, and since copyrights are in most industrialized countries are essentially perpetual now, big software houses now have a far better club to beat competitors with than patents.

Do you think another Samba or Wine project could happen if the lower courts rule for Oracle? Who would be crazy enough to even try?

Comment Re:Bell Labs (Score 1) 181

Fucking hell, I guess I'm utterly fucked, because pretty much every C program I've ever written includes #include <stdio>. Here I thought I was invoking a free and open set of library functions passed on down since the 1970s, and now it turns out I've been stealing someone's hard work in creating a standard set of functional calls. I'm dirty fucking thief.

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