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Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 1) 40

If his garbage causes you take take a different flow of execution, however, that provides him a way to reach bugs in the little-used parts of your code.

The different flow of execution triggered by an overflow trap should almost always be a simple call to "abort()". At this point, your program has already failed and should be stopped.

I disagree with your premise. Garbage input values should be checked and rejected in software before the overflow ever occurs. The hardware overflow check should be a last resort to enforce this at every instruction step, and in the worst case it converts privilege exploits into less serious DOS attacks.

Allowing "garbage output" as you propose just creates more opportunities for attacks when that output gets consumed somewhere.

Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 2) 40

What flag is that then?

On an X86, "V".

Not that checking it after every add instruction is really that practical. It would be better to have trapping and non-trapping versions of integer arithmetic, and to have languages with semantics which expose that choice to the programmer.

Businesses

Jeremy Clarkson Dismissed From Top Gear 662

An anonymous reader writes According to BBC News, Jeremy Clarkson, longstanding main host for the automobile television show Top Gear, will not have his contract renewed. This decision came about two weeks after he was suspended due to an altercation with a Top Gear producer involving catering during filming for the show. Admittedly not the nerdiest news of the day, but it can be said that his thirteen-year run on the new format of Top Gear has interested many Slashdot users who love their cars and the entertainment that the show has brought to them.

Comment Re:What's in the bill? (Score 0) 886

I can't help but notice that neither the summary nor the links actually say what the bill says. Instead, we get the TL;DR, left-wing interpretation of its effects. I'm guessing, through some quick searches, it's meant to prevent what happened to the baker who had to shut down because while he had served many gay people in the past (supposedly; I don't tend to announce my sexual orientation before buying pastries) but refused to provide a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The Constitution is meant to restrict the government, not the people. People are always going to do things, in business and society, that you dislike. This is not about "Jim Crow" segregation that was institutionalized by the government. I'm not sure how far we can restrict people's right to freely associate before we realize we've gone too far. Maybe it will be once Westboro Baptist demands a "God Hates Fags" float in a gay pride parade.

"-1, Troll" doesn't mean, "-1, I disagree".

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