Please state them. What are these changes? What are the dirty fingerprints?

Please state, explicitly, what those dangers are.

OF WHAT? So far you're throwing around vague fearmongering. Come on, do the work, put in the effort, reasearch it a bit, cite those sources, and present your argument.

I have very little trust in bigPharma, and like most megacorps, they're probably swindling the masses for all they can. But just because, say, ConAgra is getting Tax breaks doesn't mean that corn is poison or we should stop eating food.

Doesn't matter. Law enforcement can get that data with (or without) a warrant. Likewise, this data is more or less publicly available if there are ever any security breaches. And we all know that someone like FitBit would pay the utmost attention to critical information like.... how often you giggled your wrist.
Not that my home computer would be all that much secure. But it makes it a far less juicy target if there's just the one guy.

And those HIPPA laws only ever come into affect if you're cognizant of someone handing out your information. If someone out there simply knows all your details, you can't sue them, as they could have gotten it from anywhere. The problem with a retaliatory legal system is that if your rights get violated in secret and the effects linger or cause legal effects, then you're boned because you can't prove it happened. Not that I know anything better. But I don't have faith in the legal system to protect me from the legal system or people in the shadows.

Relax, I'm really not offended. I find your schoolyard level whining to be, at most, adorable.

But that doesn't mean it's not a death threat:
"Someone should probably be beheaded. Someone like you."
See that? You're suggesting I should have my head cut off. But no, it's obviously not serious and obviously you're impotent in this regard so I really don't feel threatened. It's only a small step above "hey you, go DIAF".

Now.... in case you actually hang around... think about what you're doing here. You're posing a message that you believe would endanger your job. The term "fire-able offense" comes to mind. Is that the sort of grassroots defense that the would help absolve the CIA of their international crime? (And yes, the USA signed that covenant) Do you REALLY think that suggesting I be brutally murdered is a good way to point out the difference between torture and execution?

Oh my goodness, an anonymous death-threat from someone defending CIA's torture on an online forum. That's adorable. I feel like I must be doing something right.

You know I always thought that the group of people that complained about death threats were overplaying it. I mean, who would actually send death-threats to someone complaining about torture? Or that lady complaining about how women are treated in video games, or the police brutality crowd. It really doesn't lend any weight to their argument. It makes them come off as... well... violent psychopaths with a REALLY bad grasp of irony. The exact sort of stereotype that they're being accused of being.

It's the sort of thing that makes me suspicious of some sort of casual agent provocateur. Or "trolling" if you prefer the newer term. But once you start with those sort of questions you might as well be jumping at shadows.

Damn shame he's a coward though. I'd like to hear how he thought that'd be a helpful comment.

Damn straight that guy deserves a medal.
Wish he had kept up that sort of perspective.

Don't be too sure about that bub.

No it didn't. The lawyer looked at historical data of the trainer's fitbit device. It was not the last remaining record of a airliners's demise. Nor was the wearer of the fitbit... you know.... killed.

Here we go, from another news article:

Which could honestly just be the trainer not wearing the bracelet as often.

Also, I want to point out here that the data from these devices are being used not as originally intended. Hey, it was useful for the client this time. Maybe. But you're argument here is pointing out that your data can be used to show all sorts of things. That's typically something I'd use to point out how bad of an idea it is to have a third party hold onto all this data.

Anyway, regardless of all that, it doesn't matter, someone could actually want some sort of device to act like a blackbox. Like if they were recording cops at checkpoints. I would still want that data backed up to my own computer rather than trusting "the cloud". Most specifically if I had a concern that the police might try and confiscate/lose my phone and it's recorded data.

Wow, that sucks balls. Yeah, no, if we're talking about the merits of software architectures, and which way we'd prefer things to operate, I'm going to go ahead and announce that I wouldn't purchase that service. Ever. If I got such a service, and I found I couldn't run a minecraft server, or ssh into my box, or hell, does skype work with that? Yeah, no, if I found out that's what I'd bought, I'd promptly drop it and go get something that, you know, functions.

. . . come on dude.

You want objects in C? DONE.
You want simple inheritance? Here you go:

struct father
{
    struct father* next;
};

struct son
{
    struct father inheritance;
    char* yobro;
};

But if you want a thing that contains data structures, code, and interfaces like an object in C++... that's just a .c and .h file.

Inheriting and expanding that code base in a real object oriented way is going to involve some crazy shenanigans with a lot of function pointers like you see in the GTK. It's just not simple and clean in C.

No, C is not going to get objects. If you gave it objects, that would be a fork, and many many other people have tried that. Some of them did a decent job.

C is going to be in the future. But it's not going to compete with Java, C#, or C++. And certainly not with whatever crazy web-dev language of the week they have.

OMG NO.

NO! My precious fitbit data! No one must know about my secret midnight workouts!

Ok, I know this is a low-grade troll, but hey, this is the sort of argument rummaging around in the back of laypeople's heads. Lemme tackle this one head on.

This boils down to ol' classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument, implying that anyone that is hiding anything, or advocates privacy in any way is up to no good. The broad scope of this argument has all sorts of come-backs: the right to privacy itself, unintended details becoming public (I was only half-joking about secret midnight workouts. Do you wear this thing to bed? Are you comfortable with everyone knowing when your wife woke you up?), security and vulnerability concerns, are you gay? Do you believe the earth is 6K years old? Do you want all your co-workers to know how much money you make/spend? Anyway, there are plenty of arguments for why privacy in general is good.

Specifically though, I lamented the fact that cops can go grab corporate data. You know, in pursuit of a criminal investigation, theoretically. And if the system worked as it was supposed to, and there was no police abuse, warrant were a real requirement, and they only used to catch the bad guys, hey, I'd be ok with that. I honestly do want the cops to be able to open locks when chasing anti-social criminal fuckers.
Unfortunately, the amount of trust I have in the system is waning. Now, the people with the authority to use these powers and ability to abuse these powers are really only going to make your life hard if they have cause to. It's not yet a for-profit system of abuse. NSA interns can probably still go search their girlfriends travel patterns, but meh. This is where the paranoid part come in. I'm worried about the legal system being bypassed (with warrantless wiretaps), all this data being collected as a routine measure (and stored in the NSA's Utah facility), and the current political powerhouse pressuring someone into giving them all the dirt on the opposing politician. Or some diehard Whig loyalist sending it anonymously. Or someone who hates black people and hippies. And now you have a sole political individual or party that has the power to dredge up the dirt on their opponent and run unopposed. I don't really care if some cop has the ability to look through my personal data. I'm honestly pretty vanilla and boring. But the idea that some hardliner could spy on my politician? Bad mojo right there.

Also, This is hilarious. Took me a bit to realize it was a parody site. We're approaching Poe's law when it comes to this stuff.

Hey tepples, how you doing? Slashdot mods, you get in here too.

Listen, I'm not even mad. I understand I'm not always the most eloquent and well spoken. But the idea you're suggesting here is the exact thing I was shooting down.

Yes, if you want to collect more data than will fit on the device (Gigs, we have GIGABYTES to work with), or you want backups made, or the thing is acting like a blackbox (which fitbit is not), then... and try and follow me here.... "you'd want this data on other devices." Right? It's on your phone collecting data, but you want it on a different device. Maybe the NSA's servers. Or the cloud. Or maybe you'd rather you set up a program to sync the data between your phone and your desktop. That's what I was suggesting. That people backup their phone's data onto their own personal desktops rather than uploading this data to some company's servers. I typically refer to that action as "syncing". It keeps the data in sync between two locations. And I own both. And now the storage of the device and the survivability of the device aren't as important.

To someone else, you commented:

Over the Internet? Can you seriously not connect to your computer over the Internet?
Or you can occasionally walk within the range of your home's wifi and a program syncs your phone's data to your computer, bypassing your ISP.
Or you can plug it in once in a while. Maybe charge it while it syncs.

One of the strongest arguments I have for why I want programs to work with local content.
HEY, your ad-driven phone app sends all it's data back to a central repository detailing almost every facet of my life. That's great, but I think I'll pass.

What's that? People want this data on other devices? Why do you think that means it has to go live out on a server somewhere? Have you never heard of sync?

Perhaps I'm just being paranoid here. There certainly doesn't look like there's rampant wide-spread abuse of this sort of data. Yet. But it's still the sort of thing that rubs me the wrong way.

And let's not fool ourselves, deciding which cases get the spotlight is the linchpin of our society now. Take this fiasco in Ferguson. Every year there are shooting deaths and potential race issues. Why did this one get the attention it did?

Or the Monsanto case against the guy buying feed seed, and killing off the non-roundup ready seeds. He didn't sign any contract or agree to any of the stringent IP rules from Monsanto, but Monsanto chose to push for this guy's prosecution so that they could get a ruling about how this practice is illegal for everybody.

The selective enforcement of the law is a form of corruption. When legal precedent is on the line, it's practically a controlling factor.

But some fantastically AWESOME things in the realm of unmanned exploration. Which got us all the useful aspects of space exploration which the big price tag or the trouble of launching from mars. Downside: No martian space heroes.

Give it a rest grandpa, robots are the future.

whoa ho ho there. This whole thing is about some language nuance. If you're going to try and use a broad brush, you'd best use it consistently.

Because MLK and Rosa Parks were typically refereed to as "civil rights activists", and the term "social justice warrior" (I had to google that by the way) only gained traction THIS year.

If we're going to get in a huff over language, I believe that civil rights and social justice, while having a large overlap, aren't quite the same thing. Social justice is farther-reaching while civil rights fall short of, say, firing people over whether they call you a negro or black or a colored person.

Justice is usually a reactionary thing. Retaliatory even. Rights are things you have all the time. (And violating rights should lead to justice). It's really best to stay positive, and the SJW term brings with it a negative aspect that isn't going to help the effort.

That was the entire crux of bws111's argument that I was calling bullshit upon.

Also that people like us have more control over the economic system and can pull in more money then what's really fair. It's a progressive system because a capitalistic system is regressive, winners take all and the more you win the more you can take.

Are illegal, per the definition. A tax dodge means you're not paying money you owe. ...ah ah ah, I see the term has evolved a bit. Apparently tax "avoidance" is all the legal ways people avoid paying taxes while tax "evasion" is a crime.... fuckers.

No. No no, don't drink the cool-aid. That's just a cynical view from the opposition. Capital gains taxes have a special status because, and this is the rational they use not the one I believe, because it's "already been taxed". They think that when you invest in a business, any gains the business has has been taxed, so when they sell that investment, they don't want to be taxed again. But that's bullshit and why the cynical view has developed.

If I buy a calf for $200, feed it till it's a cow, and then sell it for $1000, I pay taxes on $1000 of income. But if I buy a stock for $200, wait a few years, and sell it for $1000, then I pay a special lower rate because investing is some magical thing and it's not really property and all the other bullshit arguments.

But no, don't take the cynical view. That'll lead to an ulcer and make you a bitter man. Take the realist view that capital gains taxes are there because wealthy investors have control over the taxation system.

A variable is a hunk of memory that stores values that vary depending on what you put in there.
A const variable is variable that doesn't vary.
A volatile variable is a variable that might vary behind your back when you're not looking.

So what's is this?
const volatile myVariable;

If it takes you more than a minute you might not be a Sr. C programmer.

It's an input pin, btw. Because const is really just a euphemism for "read-only". And volatile means something else can write to it. A big hurdle that keeps kids away from C is just the language barrier and the archaic terminology. Culture has moved on and has solidified the english language around some of these sort of things, but C is stuck back in the 70's. And if the term "pin" throws you for a loop, then you're probably out of your water and need to head back towards the island of abstraction which is a safe distance from the real world.