Visiting China with such tools on your laptop? Pretty stupid, unless you're going there to spend a lot of money.

Less mass beneath my feet? That depends very much on how you measure "beneath", right? I'd argue that if your load is being distributed into something, it's beneath you. If I'm standing on a mountain which is sufficiently sharply pointed, then almost the entire mountain might be engaged in supporting my weight — cue fat jokes. But anything it's standing on is going to be the same thing, so wouldn't that make it more mass "beneath" my feet?

Anyway, I RTFA (my geek card is in the mail, it should be back at the processing facility shortly) and the article is all gushily excited that "thereâ(TM)s far more crust underneath the mountains than there is in the oceans!" Wait, was this a surprise to anyone? Mountains happen when earth gets shoved up into the air. They're not pimples.

So in short, the article comes to completely the opposite conclusion of the truth: they say that "if you wanted the least amount of mass beneath your feet, youâ(TM)d climb up to the peak of the highest mountain" when in fact, there is more mass beneath your feet if you stand on a mountain than if you stand on the seabed or in a valley, because of all the mass that by definition can't be beneath your feet if you're standing at a lower altitude.

Tunneled down into the articles, http://git.neil.brown.name/?p=... has the patch. I'm building a system with 4.0.4 right now so this was material to me

It is not difficult to be "clever" at all. Look at various "bean" frameworks. Use their object marshaling features. Throw in some of their aspect-oriented programming features.

Now you usually have a bloated, incomprehensible mess. Sure you can easily read any couple of lines of code in isolation. But the system as a whole is a huge pile of gratuitous redundant layers of abstraction and confusing action-at-a-distance creepiness.

You're a nutter, you are. AVP was actually catching virii for me, so I know it was valuable. Haven't had a valid detection in years, but I still run antivirus... because now I have multicore and SSD and the penalty is low.

I remember when AVP came out, it was both the fastest and best NT antivirus around.

Then they made a few "updates" and we started calling it "a v poo" (IT nerds are known for their maturity) because it would choke your system like a punk.

It's sad that they're still not capable of making an antivirus product that doesn't turn your awesomesauce PC into a turd.

I bought it on launch for the 360 as well and their horrible failure of execution ruined it for me much of the time. I'll wait until the PC version hits the bargain bin before I screw with them again.

They must surely mean that the parts of the system which are not the Linux kernel take up only 10kB. The kernel has crypto services in.

Adblock winds up blocking a lot of scripts, but yes, I use noscript as well since that's its primary purpose.

Speak for yourself, eh.

They annoy me because they set up such stupid pointless conditions. Why would anyone want to go to market with a fox and chickens? Who carries so much gold that it will sink a boat, who would want to hire and trust a riverman with such a marginal boat, and what happens if the next passenger weighs five pounds more?

It's more fun to ask questions back and make them admit the questions are pointless.

And I don't want to work at companies that think such questions have anything to do with how I work, so I figure I may as well have fun blowing up the interview.

I'd hope to come up with some smart ass answer involving walking on a moving bus.

It's like those annoying questions about having two chickens, a fix, and a bag of gold, trying to cross a river in a small boat which can only carry you and one thing at a time. I always imagine saying that's a pretty sorry ass boat, and maybe he needs some good ole market competition in the form of someone with a bigger boat. Or maybe to say that if I am going to market, what's with the fox -- no one sells fixes at market, so why not kill it and drape teh skin over your shoulder so you can sell the only sellable part? Or if it is a fox market, let it eat the chickens now. Or if you are coming from market, leave the fox behind. And if you are carrying so much gold that it would sink the boat, you are either an incredbly attractive thief target, or you should be able to find someone with a bigger boat, or that boat is incredibly dangerous if it is that close to sinking. /get off my lawn

But that's almost the same conversion factor as between commercial trucks and cars. By the same token, shouldn't the road taxes be divided up by who is actually doing the damage, with the commercial trucks paying vastly more?