If your critical infrastructure for your dam and nuclear plant is sending stuff out to the internet, you likely have bigger problems.

However, I won't disagree with your point about vendors being impediments to security.

Honestly, if this is a problem ... let ISPs basically block anybody who is still sending out packets with this crap.

If your machine is a threat to the rest of us, cutting you off from the the internet might get your attention.

This way when you call your ISP and say the intertubes are broken they can see the flag on your account which says "banished" and tell you to fix your PC, or stay off the internet.

But let's not pretend Linux, Android, or Apple haven't had similar problems.

The problem with botnets is people might not even know they're infected. Aggressively disconnecting from the internet might actually achieve something.

As soon as I saw the article in the Firehose, I knew they wouldn't be able to resist the SJW's siren call and it'd end up on SJWdot.

And, having spotted your favorite subject, you jumped right in.

See the endless parade of stupid SJW articles like this one. See the lack of actual news for nerds - things like Comic-Con go entirely unreported.

"News for nerds, stuff that matters." Well, you're making a strong case here that "SJW"'s matter, at least to some nerds. Especially since some of us still remember the social stigma that once made the concept meaningful, and can't help but see parallels to other groups. Indeed, I have far more sympathy for any SJW than for Anonymous Coward who apparently blames Slashdot for not skipping an article despite knowing from the headline they'd hate it.

If you're connected to the Internet, your company SHOULD have an expert. Just like when your company has a car, it should have someone that regularly inspects and repairs them. If you have a small fleet, you hire someone on an as-needed basis, but when your fleet grows you may see that it's cheaper to have someone in-house.

People just think because computers are easy to use (and they are to an extent) that everything about it is easy.

And you know what, nobody cares. I don't mean to sound rude, but whatever BB's benefits as an Android device, even BB doesn't believe them anymore as it plans to release actual Android devices. And really, it's irrelevant, as the company is basically running on fumes now. Chen's keeping it afloat by selling off assets and firing people. No wonder they have to build an Android phone, their R&D department probably isn't capable of keeping the QNX-based OS going.

Look up Perl Taint Mode. It basically throws up an error if you have not properly cleaned your variables that are sourced from outside (eg. user input) and in turn affect outside sources (eg. SQL query).

If we had something similar for JavaScript where an outside variable or personal data objects were 'tainted' and required user permissions and developer cleanup before they went back out. That way the system can't leak data. Something similar to the pop-up box on iOS (or it's lesser/broken version on Android) where it says: this app wants to use your: "location , address book , battery status , cookies "

Except no one is buying Windows Phones. They want iPhones and Androids. One has to wonder how many billions of dollars MS has blown trying to become a big smart device player. How long will their shareholders tolerate them dumping vast sums into dubious projects?

For chrissakes, has the Xbox division actually paid off the huge investments MS threw into that division? I don't mean have the last seven or eight quarters been in the black, I mean has it actually paid for itself?

Yes, it's called Android compatibility. The only successful handsets with any significant market share that don't run Android are iOS devices. In fact, what that tells me is that if you aren't Apple, you pretty much need to be Android. Even BlackBerry, though two or three years too late, has figured that out.

Nokia was already on the way out. They failed to adapt to the new phone market as defined by the iPhone. Perhaps if they had immediately switched to the Android OS and stuck to hardware only they could have kept pace and stayed relevant. Most people (myself included) have never even seen a Nokia phone without a physical keyboard. That shows the era in which they peaked and stagnated. Microsoft would have had to have saved Nokia, as opposed to just letting the Nokia status quo alone and Nokia magically being successful.

Well, next time write:
x = ++x;

I've pretty much trained myself to never use post-increment unless a statement is incorrect without it, and even then I'm unhappy if the statement has any other side effect at all (unless the entire idiom is lifted straight from K&R, and then I ponder why the code is rolling its own iterator loop.)

Post-increment can fail in interesting ways (yes, those darn sequence points). In addition, when using a template metaprogramming library, post-increment can trigger a large state copy that an unwary programmer doesn't expect. It can be horrifically less efficient.

On the other hand, the ternary operator (even a compound ternary operator) has FAR FEWER semantic ass-bites that plain old post-increment.

Post-increment: Visually familiar, but badly behaved.
Ternary: Visually unfamiliar (to some), but well behaved.

In the STL context, an important property of the ternary operator is that you don't have to declare the return type of the expression (whereas with an if/else assignment into an intermediate variable, you do). Maybe this is less important now with better "auto" support.

A prudent ?: will also keep you on the straight and narrow with respect to the ODR. You can avoid re-typing shared sub-expressions. Anyone ever debugged a program where consecutive lines of code intended to contain an identical subexpression, but actually didn't? No, I didn't think so.

Really, when someone complains about the ?: operator as some form of diabolical trickery, I flip the bozo bit. But you just can't get a programmer to embrace it for The Right Reasons who won't first master sequence points and the horror show of post-increment.

Grasshopper, this is your debugger.

Debugger, this is your new grasshopper. Enjoy your tasty meal.

This is incorrect.

The rate at which heat enters a building from warmer outside air is proportional to the difference between the temperatures. If there's a five-degree difference half as much heat energy per unit of time enters the building than if there's a ten-degree difference. The amount of heat that must be removed Monday morning is the integral of that heat flow function. If you keep the office cool all weekend, you keep the interior/exterior temperature differential large and the heat flow high. If you allow the interior to warm up then the differential decreases and heat flow decreases. Less heat in means less to pump out.

This effect is maximized in the scenario you describe, where interior temperature rises to match exterior temperature, because when the temperatures are the same heat transfer ceases, but it's useful even if the difference never falls to zero. Actually, it's even better when the temperature differential goes negative and heat starts naturally flowing out of the building (e.g. interior temperature rises during the day and exterior temperature falls enough at night to be below the elevated interior temperature). Heat that flows out naturally is heat you don't have to remove. Smart buildings should be able to improve this effect by facilitating beneficial heat transfer (e.g. opening windows or pumping exterior air through the building) and impeding undesired heat transfer (e.g. insulation, keeping doors and windows closed).

Come on guys, what the hell are you doing posting URLs with so much tracking crap embedded in it?

The third URL is arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/08/we-can-rebuild-him-philadelphia-hackers-offer-brotherly-love-to-fallen-robot/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)

And the entirety of "?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)" is just tracking crap which shouldn't even be incluced.

Are you guys getting affiliate clicks? Or are you just too damned lazy to not give us URLs full of this crap?

To the guys offering to fix this, kudos and good on 'ya.

It's 102 degrees in there, the women all have it adjusted to insane warm levels and are STILL wearing sweaters in the summer.

I swear that I saw a couple of geckos running across the floor last time I dropped off company credit card receipts.

Most time consuming bug - The AMD cpu stack corruption bug. Errata 721. It took me a year to track it down. Half that period I thought it was a software bug in the kernel, for a month I thought it was memory corruption in gcc. And most of the rest of the time was spent trying to reproduce it reliably and examine the cores from gcc to characterize the bug. Somewhere in there I realized it was a cpu bug. It took a while to reduce the cases enough to be able to reproduce the bug within 60 seconds. And the last week was putting the whole thing together into a bootable USB stick image to send to AMD so they could boot up the test environment and reproduce the bug themselves.

Bug that was the most fun - The 6522 I/O chip was a wonderful multi-feature chip with a lot of capability. There was a hardware timer bug which could jam the timer interrupt if it timed out at just the wrong time.

My general advice: Add assertions for complex pre-conditions instead of assuming that said complex pre-conditions are always properly in place. The more non-stupid assertions you have in your code, the earlier you detect the bug and the easier it is to fix.

-Matt