C itself has so many pitfalls. For the best tour review the underhanded C contest. "features" like automatic concatenation of consecutive character strings means that if you leave out a comma in a list, the adjacent array element entries are concatenated rather than throwing a syntax error. That list will now not match the declared array size (one short, so there's a null or random pointer in the last element) but the compiler allows initialization listed mismatched to the array sizes. Character strings have to be declared one longer than the initialization string length (room for the unstated \0) but are accepted by the compiler if they don't giving an unbounded string length.

it's mind boggling to realize that
int (*int)[20];
int *int[20];
are different things.

the number of different ways an array argument in a function can be written makes code hard to grasp: is it a pointer, an array, a reference? many work alike but then fail in different ways.

The most common of all pitfalls and hard to read codes are the in-line initializations that pop up in function arguments and what not. this leads to classic blunder of writing = when you mean ==.

Perhaps the most insane thing is that If you declare an external function with the wrong prototype then any mismatch in the argument count leaves or takes something off the stack. Holy cow..... I mean what the hell? Why would any language ever ever ever let you leave a orphan argument on the stack, or worse pop one off that was not yours? This is very useful for the underhanded C folks however.

While I know there's little love for fortran, it's worth noting that none of those things is even possible in Fortran, so its an existence proof that there's not any necessity for those to exist and that it doesn't limit the power of the language to remove them. It's very fair to say that no simple typo will ever compile in fortran (yes very complicated offsetting typos can compile).

there's a dongle for anything really. Apple just deprecates things slightly ahead of people realzing they soon won't need that. I recall when apple dropped the modem socket. I figured I needed that for sure and bought a modem dongle but then found I never used it. Ethernet had become easy to find then next time I traveled. When they dropped the ethernet socket, I bought an ethernet dongle. I used it about 10 times in many years. Wifi is just ubiquitous. Even when it's not around tethering to my phone was easier than reaching in the bag for the dongle and then finding a chair near an availble ethernet port. When they dropped the DVD I thought I'd miss it but oddly about the same time I stopped burning DVDs and started using thumb drives and DropBox only. The same was true when apple dropped parallel ports and then Floppies.

So apple will make dongles to bridge the momentary time you need to bridge with legacy devices, then you will find everything new you buy is wireless. It's interesting the headphone jack is still there since bluetooth chips are so cheap, easy to use, and are smaller than the headphone jack itself. I guess the problem for wireless headphones is powering them requires too many batteries.

mini USB ports became a shambles when all the new devices started breaking the specs to charge higher power devices. I din't follow this closely but it seems there are ways a USB device can can communicate that it would accept higher then default power levels. But in my experience this is totally broken. High power chargers from one manufactuer don't work with others. IN some cases the higher power devices just won't charge. When I plug my iphone into my car it constantly resets as it tries to draw too much power and the car circuit breaker kicks in. My Kindle won't charge at all on most of my wall plugs. My Dlink USB hub which has several high power ports on it will not supply high current on those when it is also plugged into the computer making them useless for charging high power devices (why have a hub you don't plug it into the computer?).

So it's total chaos in the USB world unless your phone or kindle will allow low power charging and the charging device doesn't overload when using such a device.
You also can't combine the high speed I/O functions on the USB with some low speed devices. Video output is non-standard.

The lightning blade style connector is incredibly strong, it's reversible, it's very easy to clean the socket when pocket lint gets in there. And there's so many apple devices out there that use it, there's no reason it needs to be a standard to be widely usable and widely available. There's plenty of authorized clones as well as even more cheapo knockoffs available at any gas station. In some ways being apple-only is an advantage since they can customize the power chips to get just the right power levels to the device by not trying to be everything to everyone.

Perhaps someone could explain how Tor creates anonimity. Most places I read stress the more obvious part of Onion Routing which is sort of merry go round tumbler so people can't associate where you got on from where you got off. But What I don't understand is how you preserver anonimity in the getting on part. Two things strike me as give-aways. First It seems like there has to be some zero conf step where you learn where a tor entrance node is and what port it wants to initiate the protocol. It seems like these entrance nodes would have to not change frequently so any determined adversary just needs to program key routers to watch for traffic to that IP address. Lots of diverse traffic to any specific computer with a characteristic port number would be the bread crumbs used to identify the watched IP addresses. Second, since the packets are encoded in some layered way, surely there is some sort of header or something that a deep packet inspector could recognize as a tor format, also giving the game away.

So I could see how tor could obfuscate who is talking to who, it seems like it would have a hard time obfuscating the set of people involved.

Has no one noticed that the coins disappeared at almost the same time the FBI seized Silk Road's Assets?

We're past groundhog day..

er,.. Linux was aping Multix and other *nix. It came out pretty original.

While I do wish the kids would go outside and play, it's not minecraft that's the problem, it's just the way kids are in the time of "playdates". Minecraft however is such a great game for them. It basically replaces the hours I spent with lego. I find hardcore first person shooters psychically disturbing so I'm greatly relieved when they find shooting sheep with enchanted diamond bows or building cat fountains amusing. Its similar to the way I used to build lego things that I could smash. Even better with things like raspberry pi, you can write in your own python code to build stuff or launch other people in the air when they come into your house.

The very best feature of minecraft is that there is no objective at all. Again like lego. it's up to you and your imagination. It just gives you an organized platform for creating.

What will MS do? I was afraid they might shutdown the python API on raspberry pi but they just released Windows for free on the new raspberry pi, so it looks like they might embrace it even more. I think Microsoft is finally re-learning how they became successful by being the low cost alternative to apple and IBM. they want the love again. Market share uber alles.

I suspect they might pervert it the way lego has been perverted by selling specialized kits that just build one thing. So they might sell pre-built minecraft worlds with various happy-meal like themes. Or hook it into microsoft live where you gotta pay the man a subscription to live in the microsoft amusement park. I would really resent that because kids come and go from their toy interests and so a subscription for something they are not using would hurt.

Speaking of style over function, I take it the new phone is not using LiquidMetal for it's metal. They teased a liquid metal ad last week. But it looks like just polished metal to me. Or is it? Apple's exclusive rights purchase for liquid Metal technology I beleive ran out a week ago, making it possible this could be a liquid metal phone case.

I can think of a zillion loopholes by which this will be evaded.

Is there a definition of what is THE internet? surely comcast can create a parallel construction and sell however they wish like a private toll road. It could have discrete points where it could tap into the "real" internet. Thus amazon or netflix or whomever could connect into this autobahn on the goes-into side and pop out into "the" internet at some Comcast hub in the customers town.

Picture it like FED Ex, transporting a package 90% of the way, then mailing it. the postoffice might not charge differently for different customers and Fed Ex might not either (or they could) but only customers with valuable deliveries would be willing to pay the cost of the combined service, which would be dominated by the Fed Ex high speed service.

That's effectively what companies like Akamai sell already and those are not part of the discussion of Net Neutrality.

It might be easy to regulate comcast if comcast is the parent company of both halves of this real and shadow internet. But if these services are split into two companies then what? Even if the shadow company is privately held by comcast this is going to be hard to regulate.

Eventually the shadow compaines won't even bother with their own hardware. They will lease a certain number of dedicated switches from Comcast for their own uses. these will be cut out of the real internet.

An alternative way around this is by selectively enforcing the tragedy of the commons. In principle Netflix could prioritize its packets on a neutral interenet by emitting 100 times as many packets where each packet is sent 100 times. the receiver ignores all but the first one of the redundant packets. This of course would be retaliated by others now squeezed out doing the same thing resulting in 100x the traffic for the same data and no gain for anyone. COmcast would come down hard on these miscreants but would it be selective?

Since no on knows who owns VitnetX, it would be surprising if you did. The Technology appears to have been developed by SAIC under govt contract and has been licesenced to Microsoft and others. Now that jury award has been nullified on appeal. So either by liscening or not, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping people from using the technology. So if that's the NSA objective here it seems to have not succeeded or perhaps there nver was an NSA agenda and it was simply about making money off invented technology?

Nah, the screen lights up just fine.

That's ATT's new model. In Kansas you can get a $70, gigabit connection from ATT but if you want to opt out of the customer abuse plan they charge you $30/mo extra. No I'm not making that up, but they don't call it the customer abuse plan, but that's what it is. The $30 is so they don't track you and monetize you with the scrutiny that only an ISP can do (see Verizon's tracking cookies).

Lenovo should just say the truth: the laptop was $200 cheaper than it would have been because of SuperFish. If you want to opt out of da'Fish then you gotta pay. Nobody gets hurt okay.
http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

Some news reports say that the removal tool is only partial. It removes the evil Certs from some browsers but not all. In particular not Firefox. However, it could be that there is yet another fix in the pipeline and that this is what the story is referring to.

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Samsung also got caught this month injecting ads into TV viewing. They only got caught because they screwed up the algorithm and injected ads into people's personal ad-free videos. And then samsung's genius engineers biffed again by sending the TV microphone pickups back to samsung (which is okay--that's what siri, alexa, cortana, and google do) but doing so unencrypted.

Obviously parasitic ad injection is the the single most lucrative way to earn money on the internet. Your doing it just like google does for nearly all its revenue, selling ads and harvesting click-thru data, but your doing it without the associated cost of attracting customers with a product. No wonder Lenovo wanted this action.