Isn't the banana population under serious threat because of monoculture? I remember the current banana cultivar - the Cavendish - is under threat because of lack of disease resistance because of monoculture. The previous well used cultivar, the Gros Michel, was replaced because it lost to a disease threat - also due to monoculture. The article didn't mention anything about plant disease resistance.

I swear this is not flame-bait, but this is one reason why i like the iOS model. Selective perms. Even there, Google apps ask for too much. I disable a lot (e.g. location and microphone for Google Search).

Google seems to not like this. If you don't have location turned on for Google Search, all of Google Now gets turned off, even for explicit things i ask for that they don't need my location for. I specifically asked for Bulls news (yes, Im a masochist), you don't need to know where I am to show this. But Google doesn't show.

And even the old model wasn't all that good on Android. If I have an update, they'd ask for the new perms (not able to select any, it's all, or not update) or they give an option to delete the app. The implication is that you might as well push through the new perms, or delete the app as (nearly) useless.

Though this is a bit opinion based (as only any talk of where center is can be)... the Republican Party is already right of "center". It's all relative of course - the US Democratic party would most likely be Centre-Right in most other places.

This is kind of like the joke about morals. "Im perfectly moral, anyone looser is a slut, anyone tighter is a prude, i just happen to be perfect". Both parties like to claim the Center, to be "real America". Forget center, lets worry about relative - Republicans are (almost always) Right of Democrats, and Tea Party Republicans father Right still.

The Tea-Party wing isn't, by political science terms, "conservative". The proper term is Reactionary. They are moving from Right to much Farther Right. Conservative says "lets stay where we are". The Tea-Party is more "Lets go back to where we were before."

The Gold Standard? Generally accepted as unworkable during The Great Depression. It's cool in good times, causes horrible horrible spirals in bad times. Most countries moved off of it in the 1930's. We started then, and moved completely off in the 70's, Tea Partiers want to go back to that. The fact that the locked exchange rates of the Euro countries, which act as a mini-gold-standard, exacerbated and deepened a crisis there notwithstanding.

The New Deal? Trying to rollback a lot of it (though Republicans in general want to also).

Voting Rights? Attempted rollbacks. Though the rollbacks tend to hit minorities and poor people (who don't tend to vote Republican) more.

They claim to want to go back to the Constitution. Where women couldn't vote? Where a black man was defined as 3/5 of a white man? Very Reactionary. I'm in Chicago, which wasn't in the Union in 1783. Maybe as a Tea Party person, I'd really need to talk to the Algonquin Indian tribe for leadership. I'll make sure to find some nice French Canadians to trade furs with.

We live in a complex world. A lot of people want to pretend the complexity is just a screen, that it's a cloud inflicted by (assumed to be evil) men and that they can see the Truth, the Simplicity. These are the people who are voting Tea Party. Are they batshit? Dunno. But the world is complex. And if your model of the world is to ignore the complexity and pretend it's simple, you're going to want to pull the wrong levers, and you'll most likely cause some damage.

With the Snowden leaks, the NSA issues still roaming around, with the Supreme Court looking at Aereo, do you think that anything that affects national politics does NOT hit technology?

The joke is on us.

Climate change is occurring all over the coast, and we just elected people who essentially put their fingers in their ears and say LALALALALA.

Lotus developed a system like this in the 80's. Some production cars even made it to the street.

Maybe they didn't "lean in" .. but they could have. I remember reading a talk from an engineer from Nissan/Infiniti who said they did try the "lean in" back in the 90's, but it was too weird for most drivers.

..but only Google Play supports that, not third-party app stores. I haven't looked into other app stores, and now it's less likely I will.

With the pushing back on Samzung/Tizen, and new Google Silver program, Google seems to be trying to tighten up. The fact that growing Android with more chipsets has a side effect of making Google Play more central to the experience will make some Mountain View folks very happy.

I think there's a basic issue here, and that's of "what do I want to work on". This is a problem in any project - it's not limited to coding.

I'm sure GNUTLS is coded how many things are coded. Lets start with a framework, and hang dummy code on it. Say "hey we got here!" when we got a packet. Then you flesh that out, and do what you really should do when you get that. Hey, it works! Beers all around. Then later, you start thinking "hmm, how can this get abused" and you add checks.

But wait, before you think of how you can get broken, you're like "this code needs real functionality, let me work on this next". And the boundschecks never get coded.

I'm sure you've been on a project where you thought "i really should cross all the T's, dot all the I's here" then your boss says "it works good enough" and you never get around to making it bulletproof. Or you do the fun drywall project at home, and you already sanded with 150 grit, you just not bother with the 300 grit.. it's good enough.

OpenSource doesn't mean it's not written by people, with peoples' quirks and issues.

The raw sockets deal - Windows added raw sockets, or more simply said the ability to manipulate Internet packets at a very low level. Mr Gibson acted as if the entire Internet was about to collapse. In theory it was a bit easier to make fake packets and try to mess with other computers, in practice malware that is embedded in the kernel could already do this, and the bad machines could only mess with poorly configured machines anyway. If you know networking, fake packets don't help TCP that much anyway, mostly fun to mess with UDP. There is a lot of damage you can do without raw sockets.

The knock against Steve on this wasn't so much the initial panic about raw sockets, but that he stuck to his guns once people explained how this wasn't a big deal. Either he Just Didn't Get It, or he wanted to fearmonger, or both. He sounded a bit chicken little here, and never really seemed to get why he was wrong.

Winders XP Steve hates 8, fine, we all do. But instead of going to 7, for a long time he wanted to stick with XP. His reasoning, i don't go to any bad websites, i have a firewall, etc. This is shortsighted. Malware advertising on random ad networks is a big deal now, can Steve vet EVERY ad that he sees on the net? Can he vet that every website that he visit has never been pwned and had malware inserted? Can he vet that every machine on his LAN is clean? The worse thing is that he keeps talking about how he runs XP over and over on his podcast. He kind of implies "this is safe for me to do" but never really says "nobody else in their right mind should do this".

Assembly for a long time he was crazy about assembly, kind of showing how cool he was by using it. I learned assembly/machine code from a book when i was in 7th grade or so. I think it's cool in theory to write some assembly code now. in practice I'd never use it for a real app. Why not? Partially because of time; most libraries and tools are for C or other higher-than-assembly-level languages - you'd need to reinvent a lot of wheels and hope you did them right. And partially for static checking tools which would have a much harder time with assembly checks.

Mr Gibson's podcast has some good factual info, but his opinions are occasionally off and sometimes even dangerous. It's like the story of the broken watch - a broken watch is right twice a day, but you'd need another watch to tell you when. Steve's right a lot of times, but you need to know enough already to know when he's not right, and when he's not right RUN.

#PlaysForSure

Can you imagine parsing a stack trace or equivalent from one of these? Each stack is different.

Ignoring the fact that Heisenbugs would be much more prevalent.

Part of programming is paring of states. The computer is an (effectively) infinite-state machine. When you add bounds and checks you're reducing the number of states. This would add a great deal, making bugs more prevalent. Since a lot of attacks are based on bugs, this may increase the likelihood of some attacks.

order of at least 10M$ in wasted time

Why are more and more people putting the dollar sign on the right?

I've been on Slashdot too much, i read it as "10 Micro$softs of wasted time"

I saw those slides. There were 17 levels of #ifdefs in the code. Every ifdef is a binary switch, which means 2^17 different iterations of source code.(!!!!!) That's 131072 different compiles (!!!!!!).

So, lets pretend that a config/make sequence just needs 10 minutes (unlikely, they have an oddball config script that isn't like autoconf). To hit 17 levels of ifdef, you'd need approx 910 computer-days just to do all the compiles. Do you think they tested this matrix?

I hate to beat up on a bunch of people who did hard work for free, but they really did a bad job on a lot of things.

Add to that the "oh my god we gotta copy _____" about the new USB C connector. You can flip it, just like a Lightning connector. But yet another micro connector.

And don't get me started about the "full speed" "high speed" "Higher speed" mess that is 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 speeds.

Im in Chicago, meaning Illinois.

A few years back, a cop got shot on a traffic stop. The driver pulled a gun, the cop couldn't see it, window tints. So, soon there was a state law saying o window tints, at least in front windows. That said, i see a lot of cars that have them, so not sure if the law is still on the books, or whether cops just ignore it. I'm sure if it's still on the books, it's not enforced equally black/white.