Apparently they also do passes that are good for 30 days, which cost $96 (see the comment a few places above). The scam was to buy lots of $1 tickets and reprogram them into 30-day ones.

I didn't know the shuf command existed until now. You just gave me an easier way to pick my lottery numbers -

seq 1 49 | shuf -n 6 | sort -n

Thanks for that.

gcc does warn about it, but the extra parantheses around the assignment suppress the warning. It's part of the language specification, so the compiler can't forbid it - at least not by default.

Most mediaeval cathedrals took that sort of time to finish.

It depends on the contract the author signed with whoever bought the film rights, which is usually a function of how badly he needed or wanted the money, and how good his lawyer was in comparison to the other side's. It used to be common for the publisher of the book to buy the right to adapt or convert the story to any other other medium, so they wouldn't need the author's permission to sell the movie rights. And of course, once the author is dead, his heirs, assuming they still own the rights, tend not to be so fussy about maintaining the integrity of Daddy's or Grandaddy's artistic vision...

About two million years at the current rate. Of course, if the rate of uploading continues to accelerate as it has been doing, they might get there a bit sooner.

"Zero day" refers to a vulnerability for which no patch exists, presumably because the vendor wasn't aware of it. It's the amount of time between when the vendor becomes aware of the vulnerability and when the black hats can start exploiting it, not the amount of time that it's existed.

See Prof Wikipedia for more details.

When you can type "Pringles" into the search box on your favourite torrent site and download some instructions for your 3D printer that will produce a can of them in less time and for less money than going to the store and buying a can, then food manufacturers will start putting DRM in food...

Back then, the universe contained the same amount of matter as it does now, but compressed into a much smaller volume. Therefore it was much denser - much too dense to be considered a vacuum - meaning that sound could travel through it.

I've heard (too lazy to dig out a source) that printing physical books and shipping them to the retailer accounts for about 20% of the retail price. Publishers invest a lot of money in each book that they publish (the author's advance, editing, cover design, marketing and so on). They still have the mindset that shelf space is scarce, meaning that if a book doesn't show a profit within six months or a year of release, it probably never will, because it will have been kicked out of the front of the bookshop to make room for the next release.

The problem was not Apple's app store model. The problem was that Apple allegedly colluded with the publishers to raise the prices of ebooks in other stores. With iPhone and iPad apps, it didn't matter so much, because the Apple store is the only officially-sanctioned source of those. I guess Apple didn't like the thought of having to compete on price with other ebook retailers...

Agreed, but (unless the radio is very badly designed) having circuitry for AM reception doesn't interfere with FM or digital reception. Whereas a touchscreen is an extra layer of stuff between your eyes and the pixels, which reduces image quality or has to be compensated for. A better car analogy might be that the air conditioning is always running, and the "off" switch just diverts the air flow to the outside of the vehicle...

Which the government (for some values of "government") has noticed, and decided to do something about. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information.

Book paper is too rough to wipe your arse with, and if the publisher used cheap ink, you end up dirtier than you were to start...

Blame the publishers for DRM. They're the ones who refused to let Amazon sell electronic versions of their books without it. The Kindle is perfectly happy to display un-DRMed ebooks in any of the formats it supports. KDP, Amazon's self-publishing programme, allows the author to choose whether to add DRM to the book. I've left it off all of mine, for reasons that will be familiar to any Slashdot reader.

It's the same with regional restrictions. Traditionally, authors usually license their books to publishers by territory and/or language. An author in Germany might license his book to a German publisher, but that publisher might only be allowed to sell it in Germany, or only in countries where German is the main language. They might not have the contacts or the understanding of the market to do a proper job of selling the book in other countries or languages, so they're happy to let the author or his agent try to license the book elsewhere. Amazon.de carries the German version of the ebook, which the publisher isn't allowed to sell outside Germany.

The reason that terms from the publisher's contract with the author get carried over to the retailer is because of something called agency pricing. When selling ebooks, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, not an independent entity. The publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a fixed percentage of that as commission. This is something that Apple strongarmed the publishers into doing, because they didn't want to have to compete on price when they started selling ebooks. Google "ebook price fixing lawsuit" for more information. (Agency pricing itself isn't illegal, but the lawsuit alleges that Apple and five of the big six publishers colluded to use it to keep ebook prices artificially high. Some of the publishers have already settled, and have agreed to stop using agency pricing.)

At the university I attended, it was the standard language for all the courses that involved programming or software design. That may have been because the head of the computer science department was on one of the committees that designed it. This was about 20 years ago. I was aware that it's still used for real-time applications, particularly military and aerospace, but I'm mildly surprised that anyone still cares about it enough to develop a new version of the standard. I applied for a programming job at a defence company that used it, circa 1995, but haven't had anything to do with it since.

I wouldn't describe it as complex, particularly, but it is pedantic and verbose, requiring you to prove that you know what you're doing. You have to spell out a lot of things that other languages assume by default or leave up to the specific implementation. For example, there's a statement that explicitly does nothing, like NOP in assembly languages, so you can say things like "if condition then do something else null; end if;" so that it's clear to the reader that you definitely want to do nothing if the condition is false - you didn't just forget about it. Another quirk is that if you want to mix AND and OR in a Boolean expression, you have to use brackets to show what order you want things evaluated in. "x or y or z" is fine, as is "x and y and z", but "x or y and z" is a syntax error - you have to write "(x or y) and z" or "x or (y and z)". The reasoning is that other languages differ as to whether the two operators have different precedence or the same precedence, so you might expect it to evaluate one way and find that it evaluates the other way.

Fun fact - Oracle's PL/SQL, the language in which you write triggers and stored procedures for the database, owes a lot of its syntax and semantics to Ada.