Bull-fucking-shit. AGW is about the observation that increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lead to increased energy in atmospheric systems, increased surface temperature, increased ocean temperatures, and increased absorption of CO2 into the oceans leading to acidification.

This idea that the laws of the fucking universe somehow have to abide by YOUR political ideology is so ludicrous as to make me believe you either a fucking moron or a religious fanatic.

I think the Salem Hypothesis can be extended to computer science types. They, like other kinds of engineers, mistake their mechanistic approach to their fields for science, and thus feel they have some special capacity to make judgments on fields they have little or no knowledge of.

Great. So you come up with a solution to AGW...

But let me guess, you conveniently reject the science.

The Koch Brigade is out in force today.

So investigating a conflict of interest is now "going after citizens"?

I'm not clear as to what you are referring to. What "smells like fascism"?

Yes, governments.

Who is jackbooting anyone? Last time I checked, it was the psuedo-skeptics who were comparing scientists to child molesters.

I see, so pseudo-skeptics can be as shrill and hyperbolic as they please, and that's just fine, but the scientific community is just supposed to endlessly take it up the rear.

What are you afraid of? That it will turn out most of the shit people like you believe is bullcrap invented by the Koch Brothers?

I'd rather go to a "Autoplay site owners should be beaten into comas" model, myself.

Sigh.... I need the blinking "This Is Irony" sign.

Thank you for the detailed discussion. I don't have a lot to add at this point.

I will say that your comment on virtualized DMA engines is very interesting to me, however.

At a quick look, the XOR trick depends on there being an integral type large enough to hold the pointer type, and if there is it appears to be legal. A strictly conforming implementation apparently might not have a sufficiently large integral type, although I can't imagine anybody writing one.

The XOR trick is inherently implementation dependent, since it requires manipulating a pointer while it's an integer. I think it's fair to assume anyone using it is only using it on a machine with a sufficiently wide integral type.

What's not strictly conforming in my mind is performing any manipulation on the pointer while it's represented as an integer. However, you would be correct to point out that if reinterpret_cast< sufficient_int_type >( pointer ) gives me value X, and regardless of the shenanigans I pull with X, as long as I supply that exact same bit pattern X to reinterpret_cast< orig_ptr_type >( X ) I should get the original pointer back. And if round-tripping a pointer through an int back to a pointer is strictly conforming, then the XOR trick is strictly conforming too.

(At the risk of sounding like I'm shifting goal posts, I do know the C++11 standard tried to get some wording in there to support garbage collectors. I have no idea how that language reads against the XOR trick. I do know the XOR trick would confuse GC by hiding pointers from it though. As for whether GC could ever work out-of-the-box in real, non-trivial C++98 programs that have been around awhile, allow me to show you my deeply skeptical face. You pretty much need a C++11/14 program written in a more modern style.)

In any case, can we both agree that the XOR-pointers trick is a trick best left in the last millennium in most modern systems?

The extra pointer could be legally put into the padding by a sufficiently smart compiler, I believe.

I don't believe structure copies are guaranteed to copy padding.

It's also moot on most systems: If pointers have the strictest alignment of any type on a given platform, there will never be contiguous padding large enough to accommodate a pointer. The only cases I can think of where pointers don't share the strictest alignment are systems with 32 bit pointers, but require 64-bit alignment for double and/or long long. Surprisingly (or maybe not), 32-bit x86 only requires 4 byte alignment for double and long long.

So even if it was legal for the compiler to play games on you within the padding in a POD type, on most commercially viable systems you'll never have the padding you need in a contiguous field.

We're rather far into the "theoretically possible, but with such restrictions that nobody would bother."

Don't be a silly bastard. If you did that, you would get the actual answer to the question you're posing, and not the answer you want.

Jesus, what a unsophisticated provincial type you are.

I read at least two novels a month (sometimes more if I get the time) on my tablet and my phone. Most of my reading is on my tablet, because it's a 7" and a damned good size to read on, but when I'm on the road, I'll use my phone. The app syncs between the two so I can swap between the two. I generally use the Kobo app, and by and large it hides the status bar at the top so I'm not bothered by incoming emails. I've never had a problem.

Actually, the very first book I read on a portable device was a crappy little LG Keybo feature phone that I installed a nice little J2ME reader on. The font size was punched up a bit so I usually only got a paragraph of text per screen, but still didn't have any problem.

I'll be honest, I haven't bought a physical book in over a year. Even the technical books; a Powershell book and the OpenVPN official manual, are all eBooks.