Reviving death threats? So she brought them back to life after they were dead?

Please fix the headline if you do accept yet another dumb "gamergate" story.

OK, so since it seems no one else knows who RAPstar or Mano Paul is either, let's go with this dumb question: what's your favorite Pokemon?

Actually, I think I can turn this into something vaguely on topic since someone managed to do a TAS of Pokemon Yellow that manages to run arbitrary code, ultimately calculating pi to several digits.

So have you ever found an exploit in a game or something and used it to your advantage? Or what's the coolest, unintentional behavior you've done with a computer program?

You may have posted anonymously but I'm going to back you up on that. I think I had like five domains blacklisted on Google when they used to support that feature. The ones I remember were w3schools.com, experts-exchange.com, and javaranch.com.

Never, ever anything useful on any of those sites.

(Not that this really has anything to do with the article or that I doubt her skills with the Java language. I just found javaranch to be utterly useless.)

Radcliffe didn't become a full part of Harvard until 1977. Only then could you argue that a Harvard degree and a Radcliffe degree were effectively the same thing.

Sure, at least Harvard was educating women, but there was still a definitive dividing line between "education for women" and "education for men" at Harvard through 1977 at the earliest.

Which still makes them honoring Malala Yousafzai somewhat ironic considering how long it took them to get around to providing women the same education they provided men.

What's really ironic is Harvard awarding Malala Yousafzai "Humanitarian of the Year" for her efforts in promoting education for women.

Harvard started accepting women in 1999. Malala would have been two at the time.

That thought got mangled while I was editing the comment to try and make it more generic.

It was an email from the very same vendor suggesting I might be interested in the item I just bought from them a week ago based on a purchase made two weeks ago.

From other comments, this isn't exactly uncommon.

Creepiest ad I ever saw was an ad that keyed off my location and the weather to advertise a tent. (Not sure why they decided I'd want a tent because it was raining, but the ad included my incorrectly detected location and weather based on said location.)

I've learned to always open Amazon.com links in incognito windows. Tons of people link to weird products on Amazon.com and I definitely don't need to have Amazon.com try and sell me the really weird fetish fanfic that someone's seriously trying to sell for $5 just because someone linked it to me. Amazon still tries to sell me 40 pound bags of cereal marshmallows. I still have no idea why that's a product anyone who isn't making knock-off Lucky Charms would want.

Also annoying is getting emails from vendors for things I already bought from the vendor because apparently Big Data is good enough to figure out I might be interested but not good enough to realize that the reason it thinks I might be interested is because I already purchased the item.

There actually is a standard for Java version numbers, though, and in this hypothetical API, various OS versions would be represented using a common API, allowing consistent code that needs to ask for a version range.

Of those numbers, none of them are valid Java version numbers.

Then again, the current Java version (1.8.0_20) is also not valid by that spec. So, uh, yeah. Go Oracle.

If your code is old enough to be checking for Windows 9x, chances are you're really asking "am I running under NT, or 9x?"

And os.version is 100% useless for that, since Windows NT and Windows 95 could both (honestly) report an os.version of "4.0".

So instead they checked the os.name since that check was easier and you had two "4.0" lines of code you wanted to tell apart. (Of course, then there was Windows ME. Oops. Of course, they could have checked for Windows NT. But then there was Windows 2000. Oops.)

Of course, the real problem is that the Java API for checking the underlying OS version sucks ass and is literally a collection of three strings that have no well-defined values. (What's os.name under Linux? Just "Linux"? "GNU/Linux"? The distro name? I guess any of those are just as valid!)

You'd think by Java version 8 they could have added some better API for dealing with the OS like something as simple as an "os.family" value ("Windows NT", "OS X", "Linux") and APIs for dealing with comparing version numbers. But, nope. I mean, after all, there's a spec for what version numbers should look like but the API for dealing with them still processes them as strings! (Well, there is java.lang.Package.isCompatibleWith(String) which would still be useless in this case.)

It doesn't. There's a set of three properties for the OS, and that's all you get. They're documented as follows:

os.name

Operating system name

os.arch

Operating system architecture

os.version

Operating system version

Now you might be wondering, "well, OK, what sort of values does os.name contain?" And the answer is as you saw in the code shown "things like Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows XP".

os.arch contains things like x86 and amd64 but I forget exactly what it reports for which OSes. I think it's amd64 for all 64-bit x86 platforms, but I could be wrong.

That final os.version reports the "real" Windows version, so it reports like "5.1" for XP and "6.0" for Vista. (Under Linux, it's apparently the kernel version.)

Of course, the documentation doesn't provide any sort of "examples of what these values can contain" so the only way people would know is by trying out various VMs on various OSes. And even then the documentation is vague enough that I suspect a VM is OK in returning anything it pleases in those fields. Plus the user can override them by starting the JVM with -Dos.name=whatever.

It's also worth noting that despite being an incredibly common thing, there's still no Java API for dealing with version numbers. There are on the other hand two UI toolkits (or maybe three, not sure what JavaFX counts as), at least three different ways of parsing XML I know of, two different "string buffer" classes, and two entirely different I/O libraries.

(Although frequently the newer APIs use parts of the older APIs, so JavaFX is built on Swing is built on AWT and the "new" I/O library uses some (but not all) of the "old" I/O library. Welcome to Java.)

It's not even that. One thing I learned while working on a project that wanted to pull EMR data was that different hospitals could have their own schemas. One division in the hospital found that the standardized codes for what they were doing weren't robust enough and invented their very own coding system which was used in that single division of that single hospital and nowhere else.

Good luck translating that to any other coding system anywhere else.

I'm not sure I can even blame them for creating their own coding system. They're doctors who found that the tools available didn't meet their needs and found a solution. Down the line it makes data transfer more difficult, but is that something doctors should really be concerned about when they're trying to accurately record medical information about their patients?

Which HL7 standard do you mean? V2 or V3? (So HIPAA can't be HL7 2.0, since HL7 is already up to 3.0.)

Or FHIR, the amazing new standard from the people who brought you HL7 that brings the amazing bewildering complexity of HL7 to you in a nice new XML-based format?

I worked on a project that wanted to take in a bunch of data from a hospital's EMR and essentially do some analysis on it. The project was canceled before we ever managed to get data out of an EMR because it turns out to be nearly impossible.

"But aren't there EMR data export standards?"

Why, yes, yes they are! Multiple ones, in fact!

Unfortunately, the formats are complex enough that basically every single EMR has the ability to format a perfectly standards-compliant document representing the exact same data in an entirely different way.

And that's ignoring that, as I recall, we discovered that ultimately the data we were looking for were entered into the hospital's EMR as PDFs. The EMR could locate the PDFs, but it didn't "know" the data they contained.

So I'm not at all surprised to learn that doctors are resorting to faxing records. It's almost certainly easier than trying to exchange them digitally.

You make a phone that can't be bent by being left in someone's pocket, so that if it is bent, it clearly was damage beyond the scope of the warranty?

They have a video. That's exactly what they do: they place the phone on two blocks of wood, and then have a machine apply a set amount of pounds of force to a bar placed across the middle of the phone.

About all their test tells you is that you shouldn't take Consumer Reports tests seriously if this is the kind of testing they're going to do. Especially because the people bending the phones weren't bending them straight in the middle, they were bending them right below the volume buttons. Which is also where their test phone's case actually breaks, even though the bend is down where they placed the bar.