Fanbois downvoting, eh?

Have you ever bothered to read the notes on Windows 7 updates? You'd be disgusted to realize how many of them "may require a system restart". Over half. WAY over half.

Same here, and that's on an *ancient* NVidia card (fanless 8600 IIRC) and a P4 3.8GHz with only 800 MHz memory.

Raw Debian had some issues with tearing prior to their latest driver updates from NVidia, but I've no doubt those issues have been addressed with their latest stable release (which has newer drivers.) Most of the tearing was with Flash playback, though -- VLC did a pretty good job with upscaled 720p videos.

Sounds good! I am all for more of Microsoft's cash being transferred to the shareholders of Salesforce.

America has one of the highest corporate tax rate in the world. That is the main reason that corporations have been leaving.

The 90% tax bracket was an personal rate, that did not apply to corporations. The corporate rate has never been much above 50%, and even that was generally in wartime.

Corporate tax rate by year

That video is about talking to the police if you are a suspect in a crime. It is not about talking to the police if you are a witness.

Which companies voluntarily turn over customer location data to the police? Please name names.

I'd be curious to know if it actually is a bad thing to have... In the context of a rocket, there isn't exactly a lot of spare mass, spare volume, or engineers just sitting around and wallowing in boredom because the design is trivially simple and every niggling problem has been worked out.

If you skipped the launch escape system, you'd be able to transport more in the same number of launches(or the same amount in fewer) and your craft would be less complex, allowing you to focus on making the remaining systems less likely to need an escape.

Even if you don't fancy a look at our (honestly somewhat curious) level of risk aversion around space activity, it's not clear that adding an escape pod is a better investment, in terms of lives saved, than spending the resources on more extensive testing, improved reliability, and similar for the main systems. It's very much unlike the car scenario, where even 100% perfect engineering doesn't change the fact that other people are going to screw up and crash into you, and that a fair number of your drivers are going to be incompetent, drunk, or distracted; so you fairly quickly run out of improvements to the drive and steering system and have to achieve further survival gains by building in crash resistance. With a rocket, building a launch system that doesn't destroy itself and/or kill the passengers some of the time is quite challenging; but there isn't the same presence of ineradicable external danger, if your system doesn't kill the passengers, they'll survive.(Until you get them into orbit, where the micrometeorites can take them out...)

...until they get their personal data stolen because of a security flaw in the OS, which of course was long patched in later version of Android.

My Slashdot username predates my current employment arrangement by about 5 years, I think. But, yeah. Back then I ran FreeBSD (which is where the name is from) on my servers, and Gentoo on my desktop. Things change :) (well, some of them; some of my home servers are still FreeBSD - ain't broken and all that...)

By now, though, it's not really all that surprising, given the amount of work specifically targeting other platforms (Linux among them) happening throughout the company. My team, for example, is actually specifically looking for people with a Linux background right now, because we're building a service running on it, using Docker containers for isolation.

You could... you know... remove the wristband or whatever and then move away. However if they are trying to separate you from your PC quickly they might not notice a mono-filament line. You however could easily slip off said monofilament before going to pee.

Oh, I see, so now FOIA-requests are bad too — EPA certainly would be far more affected by such "harassment" than US Marshals Service or any other agencies using Stingray for example.

Or am I missing some giant dollop of sarcasm here?

You made me spit my coffee, thanks.

Do you honestly think that the Caliphates were in any way different from European colonists? Do you honestly think that Persia left everyone alone for the 1500 years before Islam came along? Do you know about the Russo-Persian and Anglo-Persian wars, or the 1953 Iranian coup? Do you know anything about the history of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Algeria? What do you think caused the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

The history of Islam is the history of everywhere else in the world.

Incidentally, you wrote this less than a week after the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, where the British Empire (Australians and New Zealanders commemorate the battle most closely) fought the Ottoman Empire, which was Germany's ally.

The West prefers drone strikes these days. It's far less personal.

Nobody has yet beaten the record of Mao's China, although Stalin's Russia came pretty close.

In this particular case I just happen to know exactly what they were thinking when they were implementing this feature, because they are my colleagues (even if I don't work on the team that works on C++) :) The list of features that they did was based on some specific libraries that they had most complaints about on Windows, and then filtered down further based on ease of implementation. If I remember correctly, one major beneficiary of those changes is supposed to be ffmpeg.

This all might make more sense if you remember that Office in some incarnation or the other now ships across three non-Windows platforms (OS X, iOS and Android), then there is the OneDrive client etc. Basically there's a whole bunch of stuff that has suddenly gone cross-plat in the past couple of years, and that's a lot of C++ code that now has to play ball with the libraries that are the de facto standard outside of the MS ecosystem. In many cases, once you start doing that, it makes sense to use the same library on Windows as well, but then you start running into those conformance issues with C99.

The other aspect is that we want people to write cross-platform C and C++ code, because it's the kind that, right now, is most easily portable between all mobile platforms - and seeing where Windows phones and tables are in terms of popularity relative to iOS and Android, MS has to encourage portability as a way to get more apps ported to Windows. You see things like Apache Cordova tools and Clang/LLDB support in VS 2015 for the same reason - they make it easier to write Android apps, for example, but more importantly, the way they encourage writing those apps just happens to be the one that emphasizes portable code. Now that is more geared towards C++, but the question of popular libraries written in C also comes up there.

I don't recall which comment mode this works with, but also try <ecode> instead of <code>. This also makes it unnecessary to escape < and > between the tags.

Not quite. VS 2013 actually saw a bunch of C-specific C99 features such as designated initializers for structs. The main reason why this was done is because there are now quite a few popular open source libraries that use those features, and VC is the only compiler that cannot handle them, which made it a pain to port them to Windows.