Ha! It's not like they don't actually want all that delicious, valuable customer data. That stuff is pure gold. They just want to be able to use it themselves, such as selling access to "interested third parties".

My summation / interpretation of the article's premise: "We don't want a huge security breach that will embarrass us, but we don't actually want to spend a lot of money on the problem."

They do, and the problem is that they treat it exactly like one. When you buy a lock, do you immediately re-key it? No: you use it as-is. Now maybe if the key looked very suspicious, like say it was a perfect sine or square wave or it was completely smooth, then you might ask the blacksmith whether that's normal. I bet those shopkeepers would be asking the same of their POS installer if the password was "123456" or "111111".

But to their (and my) untrained eye, "166816" looks reasonably random. It looks as random as my Schlage house key does. Maybe there's a locksmith forum where experts are making fun of me for not changing my obviously default lock. After all, they can tell at a glance that I have the standard factory issue! How stupid am I for using it without making my own pattern!

No, I think you're exactly wrong. People think of these passwords as keys. They use the ones manufacturers give them. They hand them out to the same staff that have keys to the front door and cash drawers. They don't routinely change them when people quit. They don't audit their usage. They treat them just like the little medal danglies on the ring in their pocket, no more, no less. We've done a very poor job of telling them why they should think otherwise.

Or you could just buy it directly through the device like everyone else does. I haven't bought music through a desktop iTunes app in a long time.

I hereby present you with today's Indignant Goldberg award for simultaneously finding the most convoluted way possible to perform a common operation and also bitching about its difficulty.

Except the Apps can't be installed if you refuse

Xposed Framework + XPrivacy. Boom.

So much this. In the Slashdot echo chamber we presume that everyone in the world should be the security experts we are. No one outside forums like this thinks the way we do. Your average mom & pop grocer doesn't know about security, can't imagine what a "default password" is or why it would be bad, and sees a POS as an appliance much like a refrigerator or stove.

Tell a restaurateur that they're stupid for not changing the default password, and they're likely to tell you how your stupid home food storage and cooking methods are likely to give you listeriosis. We are experts in our domain, and expecting everyone else to care about it (especially while remaining ignorant of their specialties) is a major failing on our part, not theirs.

I bought a MacBook Pro because it gave me hipster cred, not because it runs all the Unix software I need for work better than Windows ever could or because it runs all the desktop software I like that's not available for Linux. I have a daily OmniFocus reminder to use Emacs to write a love letter to Tim Cook.

I certainly didn't buy an iPhone because it's a nice phone that integrates well with my Mac software, and I only bought an Apple Watch because the brain implanted kool aid told me to and not because I think it's an attractive watch with tier-one support from a highly rated electronics manufacturer.

I love only shiny things and I'm a sheeperson with an IQ of 43. Baaah. I'm not influenced by things like "build quality", "enormous ecosystem", or "meets all my requirements better than the alternatives that I've used extensively at work". Those things are crazy talk.

No, it's all reference counted, meaning that as soon as the object goes out of scope, the reference count decreases, and if it hits zero, the memory is freed right then and there. It doesn't work like languages with managed memory and a garbage collector, such as Java or C#. When memory gets freed is 100% deterministic.

Of course, if you mean that you could lose track of shared pointers, that's true enough. But that's also true in *any* language that I'm aware of, so C++ is no different in that regard. No language will succeed against the wiles of a terrible programmer.

I think you misunderstand me a bit. I'm not saying to start with C++ 11 vs 14 as a language, only that you're going to get better results searching for C++ 11 on the internet when trying to find tutorials about how to use most of those new features. Most of those new articles were written when C++ 14 was not yet ratified. No one wrote new tutorials about how to use shared_ptr when C++ 14 was released because nothing really changed in terms of the basics.

Incidentally, I would never advocate the "progression" approach myself. When teaching C++, there's zero need to teach C first (I learned C++, then C), and starting with C++ 98 would be insane nowadays. Keep in mind that I'm just talking about the order one should learn the new features of the language, not a specific version of the language itself. It just happens that for someone migrating from C++ 98 to C++ 14, the features introduced in C++ 11 are far and away the most important for about 95% of your day-to-day programming needs.

I can think of only one C++ 14-specific feature that would be good to know off-hand when starting out, which is that there's now a std::make_unique() function, just like std::make_shared(). Everything else can wait until you've learned the core new features.

What we really need is IPv8, based on IPv4 with a larger address pool and no other irrational changes to the protocol. IPv6 simply adds too much complexity to the system.

The vast majority of IPv6 addresses being assigned aren't routable anyway -- do you really think those random local addresses you gave on your LAN at home can be globally routed from anywhere? Sure, if you get an assignment from your ISP, but do you really want your home alarm system, clock radio and fridge globally routable in the first place?

Why do you believe IPv6 routing is faster than IPv4?

What rational argument is there that makes it right to strip ownership from the copyright holder after a few decades? Does real estate become public domain after 100 years of ownership?

You have confused ideas with property. The only rational argument for using state force to punish people or make them pay for making a copy of a work is that doing so promotes the creation of more works. That excuse falls off rather rapidly once the author is dead.

A song is not real estate -- if I go into Bob Dylan's house it affects his life, if I sing one of his songs it doesn't -- and so your comparison makes no sense.

Nah, I didn't take you all that seriously ("Space Hippies" was a giveaway), but I thought I'd answer pragmatically, because I've seen people talk about it fairly often. So, yeah, sorry for sounding so humor-impaired. It annoys me when people don't get my jokes too.

As an apology, here's an interesting nuclear waste disposal plan. Here's a hint: Nuclear Lawn Darts.

Hmm... let's see... First off, you'll probably have better luck searching for C++ 11 than C++ 14, which were very subtle changes compared to 11, and not worth worrying about when first learning. You can read up on what changed in 14 later.

In a nutshell, I'd say that the biggest change is the notion that you should very rarely have to use raw pointers any more, meaning you generally shouldn't allocate or release memory with new or delete. By applying RAII principle and smart pointers, you can virtually eliminate all chances of accidental resource and memory leaks.

What's more, you get almost the same sense that you're using a language with managed memory, since you don't typically have to use delete, and even writing destructors becomes much more rare. So, I'd probably start by learning about the smart pointers and which versions to use when, how to properly cast them, and how to use the factory functions in place of 'new'.

I picked up a lot of information on the web via simple tutorial blogs about specific topics, but I also read through Stroustrup's book The C++ Programming Language (fourth edition) as a definitive reference.

Don't feel the need to rush into all the new features. Just start with the basics (nullptr, auto, smart pointers, class enum), and then move to more advanced topics (move semantics, lambas, etc).

Good luck!