I don't know about the iPhone specifically, but if you are far enough into your current contract (typically at least a year) AT&T will always let you sign a "new two-year AT&T wireless service contract". You don't have to be a new customer to sign a new contract.

I must be living under a rock. I hadn't heard of this before today....

So now Microsoft is helping me search for low fares on Southwest? Neet!

As somebody relatively new to the Mac world, I have a random question. Given how standardized all of the other Meta key commands seem to be from one application to the next, why can't any two programs agree on the same key combination to switch tabs?

Chrome uses Meta+Alt+Arrow. Safari uses Meta+Shift+{}. Firefox uses Ctrl+Tab. Coming from a non-Mac background, Firefox is the only one that makes any sense to me, although I'll admit it's a little odd in that it is the only one that doesn't use the Meta key. And it's a little hard to keep that straight with Meta+Tab / Meta + `. But at least it doesn't require double chording or taking my hand off the mouse.

But really, can't you guys just all agree on the one true way and be done with it? Must I be condemned to constantly hit the wrong key combination every time I switch windows.

I wondered about that too. I also noticed that it specifically mentioned urine concentrations. Now, I'm far from an expert on the subject, but as I understand it this means that my kidneys are doing their job, and filtering the stuff out of my blood stream. It seems to me that how much of this shows up in my urine is less interesting than how long it sits in my body before my kidneys take care of it, and what problems it's causing there.

That small amounts of BPA are capable of leaching out of bottles and into the liquids that they contain has been known for years. What's less well understood (at least the last time I really bothered to read up on this at all) is what it actually does, if anything, once it's there.

I have no problem with people who have such an attitude. My problem with that attitude arises when the same person starts pretending he actually does know something about the computer. If he doesn't care to learn anything about how the computer works, then when they have a problem, they should admit it and say "The computer doesn't work." If they feel the need to be more specific than that, them they should learn what it actually means.

If his watch stops working and he takes it in to a watch repair shop to get it fixed, what does he tell them?

When I first started using Linux, the sound on Linux had some severe drawbacks. Aside from having a compatible card and just getting it working in the first place, the way to output sound was to write to /dev/dsp, and only application could open the sound device at a time. Around that time, somebody created "esd", which was a terrible hack. The idea was that esd would be the one application that could write to the sound device, and everything that wanted to output sound would write to a virtual device created by esd. Of course, this only worked for applications that were esd aware, and all manner of hacks and misdirection had to be done to get ever other app in the world to communicate with esd instead of /dev/dsp.

Some time later, ALSA replaced OSS as the standard sound driver on Linux. Besides having much wider device support and being far easier to actually get to work, ALSA also removed most of the software shortcomings of OSS, making sound daemons like esd no longer necessary. Now, you would think that people would have been overjoyed to no longer have to use as awful hack like esd, but somehow the opposite happened. Now, instead of just esd, we have esd, aRTS, PulseAudio, Jack, and probably several others that I am not aware of. And what's even better, depending on your setup, you may even have the fortune of using multiple of them at the same time. As of 8.10, Ubuntu uses PulseAudio by default, so if you use KDE, your sound goes through four different layers to actually get to your sound card: Application -> aRTS -> PulseAudio -> ALSA. Woo!

Why do we still have to resort to these ridiculous hacks to fix something that's no longer broken?

That's about what I thought. While I appreciate the difficulty in actually taking the picture, I don't really find it to be very impressive.

I understand the problem you are describing, but I fail to see how this solution addresses it. If there is already a disconnect between the programmer doing the copying and the programmer doing the allocating, then making the programmer doing the copying repeat himself is not going to fix the problem.

The only problem this function solves is buffer over flows caused by a programmer calculating a number of bytes to copy at runtime (e.g. by reading it from a Content-Length header) and failing to check the calculated value against what he believes is the actual size of the buffer. If the value that he believes to be the size of the buffer is wrong, changing from memcpy to memcpy_s will not catch the mistake. In other words, changing from memcpy to memcpy_s will only protect against sloppy programmers, and if they don't understand what the function is supposed to be protecting them from (which is likely) they'll probably just use the same value for copy_size and dst_size anyway (or switch to memmove), which will completely defeat the purpose of blacklisting memcpy in the first place.

Not to mention, if you're doing any pointer arithmetic and writing to an offset some number of bytes past *buffer, then passing the size of *buffer doesn't really help, unless the function is smart enough to know that (I don't see how it could be unless we pass that as a parameter as well), or the user is smart enough to calculate the remaining size of *buffer. If the user is one of the sloppy programmers that this function is meant to protect against in the first place, I think that is highly unlikely, don't you?

or better:
    #define memcpy(x,y,z) memcpy_s(x,y,z,z)

The great thing about Duke 3D was the combination of silliness and strategy. Quake had I think 7 different weapons that you could use, but with few exceptions there wasn't any real strategy to them. There were different balances of power, rate of fire, and splash damage, but it was all just variations of "fire projectile at the other guy."

The single player game was amusing, with Duke's comments and the props giving a more light-hearted feel to the environment than most other FPS's, but what made the game really shine was its multi-player. Weapons like the pipe bomb, laser trip mines and shrink-o-matic and items like the jet pack and steroid pills added a new level of strategy to multiplayer gameplay that had not been seen in FPS games up until that time. And the silliness of some of the weapons added to the fun. I still remember almost falling out of my chair laughing while trying to avoid getting stepped on after getting hit with the shrink-o-matic at point blank range.

I'm fairly certain that most end users couldn't tell you whether an application is multithreaded, or would care even if they knew.

I've been using Firefox on a Mac for a month or two now, and haven't noticed it sucking. But then, I think most of the software that came installed on the Mac sucks, so maybe I just haven't finished my kool-aid yet.

What I don't get is why the "Newspapers" app would require the label if Safari wouldn't. Or, since the feature is not available in the current version of iPhone OS, why would they reject the app on this basis while still including a full featured web browser on the phone.

Based on previous stores we've heard of app rejection, I wonder if Apple is planning on including their own newspaper functionality in the next iPhone and is trying to stave off potential competition early.

There are many different kinds of green in the world, and different people assign different priorities to different aspects. It is possible that this request was completely unrelated to carbon footprint or landfill space.

Have you ever been near a large number of running laser printers? At one of my previous employers, one of our bigger jobs was to mail out around a quarter of a million portfolio performance reports every quarter. This required, among other things, a room full of a dozen or so laser printers that ran around the clock for at least a week. Despite the ventilation being done, I would get a headache after spending about 2 minutes just down the hallway from where these reports were being printed.

Fused toner (actually, toner in general, if I understand correctly) is an incredibly noxious compound. It wouldn't surprise me if any company that uses a half a dozen or more laser printers could noticeably improve the air quality in their office by switching to so based inks. If that is the case, then switching to a soy based toner would most certainly be "green" (by some peoples definition anyway) even if it doesn't reduce the waste output of the office by a single ounce.

It is also possible that paper printed with soy inks may be easier to recycle than paper printed with traditional toner. If so, then by using so inks, a company i decreasng the energy expended in the lifecyce of the paper that is used by their office, again, a very green achievement even if it does not reduce the actual waste produced by the printer.

This seems to be a big problem with any attempt to improve the environment. Too many environmentalists seem to be overly willing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There seems to be a prevailing attitude that measures that are better than the status quo are not worth pursuing because we should be able to do better.

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.

He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.

Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.

It's one thing if you take issue with what they are teaching, or even how they are teaching. There are legitimate differences in the teaching styles of different teachers. But most of the cases cited in the article weren't about teachers who's teaching ability was in question: "The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission... In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor."

People are going to pounce on me with comments like "Nothing's secure! I got downsized just last month!" to which I must reply: --And how long was it before you found another job? A month? Two? SIX???

About two and a half years, actually. And when my father-in-law lost his job, it was about a year and a half. Conversely, I know a couple of grade school teachers who got new jobs within a month, and not always within the same state (by their choice).