If the security sucks, the product usually still works. That's the basic problem.

The web browsers and email in early smartphones were crap, but the phone part worked. The original iPhone was a crappy phone. Turned out people wanted a decent web browser and mail more than they did a decent phone.

Well, many banks shut down their ATM network at night anyhow in Japan so it's not as though it makes any difference.

There are standalone ATMs at many convenience stores in Japan. Thieves have taken to busting in the window with a backhoe and grabbing the whole machine.

I did most of my work on Unix before I started at Apple in '95. All of the new OS development was being done in C by then. I suspect that before most of the OS development had been done in 68K assembler, not Pascal. When the switch to PPC started, Apple needed a cross-platform systems programming language and Pascal was not it.

This article from '93 references how the industry mindset had switched to C/C++ and that pushed Apple.

https://www.schneier.com/essay...

One thing to remember is that at that time, both Macs and PCs were not very powerful machines and large applications were being developed for Unix workstations.

UCSD P-system was a virtual machine. introduced back in '78. I think it was most popular on the Apple II, though it ran on PC's and even the PDP-11. I went to UCSD in the mid 80's and we learned Pascal on PC's but the PDP-11's (these were small graphics workstations, not minis) were running RT-11, if I remember correctly and we used them for the assembly language class.

I'd say that the reason C eclipsed Pascal was the popularity of Unix. There was an explosion of Unix systems in the mid 80's (including Sun workstations but many, many others) that were fairly inexpensive but with a lot of power and they were all programmed in C. Pascal had a lot of popularity on PC's with Turbo Pascal and a lot of stuff written of the Macintosh was Pascal back then (if you look at the old Mac API's you'll see an abundance of "pstrings" or Pascal strings) but C was "cooler" because it was coming out of the Unix world.

This is very true. Another issue is not that there's anything embarrassing or bad, but the sheer work of producing documents for a lawsuit can be be very expensive. If you do keep emails or other records beyond the legal retention limits they can still be subpoenaed, but if you destroy them on a regular schedule, well, can't produce what you don't have.

Developed countries don't need to promote population control - it happens by itself. Every developed nation except for the United States (which has large amounts of immigration) has a declining birth rate. And, yes, it is a problem for retirement schemes.

As far as I can tell the "washing" of the granules is part of the automatic cycle.

Why do I think "Star-bellied Sneetch"?

How do you think /dev/null is implemented?

Real didn't remove the Apple DRM, though, they added it. That's not DRM circumvention. Real had the rights to distribute the music. If there was some legal issue with creating the FairPlay (gotta love them names) compatible files, Apple would have sued Real rather than just adding code to reject their files.

I think there may be some merit to this.

First, it makes the tax structure for companies a lot simpler. The amount of paperwork for tracking all of your expenses is silly (I _hate_ saving and tracking receipts) and you don't know how much your tax will be until you know how much your profit is. If it's a percentage of revenues you can just figure it in to your costs and be done.

Second, the tax on income penalized businesses saving. So, if you need to make a big investment that you can't finance out of revenues in a single tax year it makes more sense to borrow for it than it does to save profits for a few years. When times are good, borrowing is fairly easy. However, as soon as a recession hits, banks start to trim credit lines and refuse to make new loans. This decreases investment and makes the recession worse. If more businesses were financing themselves out saved profits the business cycle would probably not be as much of a boom/bust as it.

The difference is that for a corporation almost everything is a business expense whereas for an individual you can't deduct things like food, clothing and other things not directly related to the business.

I remember hearing that back in the mid-80's. May I introduce you to bubble memory?