If the US cared about stealing oil, it would annex its main supplier ... which is, IIRC, Canada.

If I were to die today, most of my recent stuff would die with me, but my older offline backups are still unencrypted. And goodness knows what Google and Facebook would do with the stuff they have.

But supposing I live a normal lifespan, who has a clue? My data storage and privacy habits have changed unrecognizably in the last decade, just as they changed unrecognizably in the decade before that and the decade before that. Who knows what the next decade will bring, let alone the next 50-70 years, assuming that no medical breakthroughs in that time extend my life even further?

For example, just this morning I replaced Debian on my computer with the Twitter API. It works great, boot times are much faster. Now I'm going to uninstall Firefox and just access the web via the Facebook API.

But wouldn't variables declared in the middle of the function still have function scope anyway?

Not in the sense you appear to have in mind. This is C, not Javascript or Python. A variable declared halfway through the function has a scope half the size of one declared at the start, and cannot be accidentally read before it has been initialized.

And safer, too, since it means you can always see at a glance that every variable is being initialized properly before it's used.

(Also it is not always possible, or even desirable, to break code into functions of a few lines. Anyone who claims otherwise is a puritan fanatic whose assertions should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; it is unlikely they have experience with a broad range of complex real-world programming situations.)

OK, let's refine the statement, then: you should not use MSVC if you can avoid it because it is non-free and perfectly usable free alternatives are readily available.

Seems quite reasonable and consistent now. The alternatives are also better, since they implement C language features standardized less than 20 years ago!

"For a decades-old version of the standard that was made obsolete before the end of the last millenium, ..."

I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Mixed declarations and code is standard C and has been for over a decade. It is not a GCC extension. It is a basic part of the standard C programming language that any modern compiler should implement.

Age has nothing to do with that. I cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC, but Microsoft had nothing to do with the implementation. And while I did use Windows for a while in my teens before I matured into a *nix user, those were the days before Microsoft's monopoly abuse had quite destroyed all competition in the markets they chose to enter, so I was able to choose from a range of development tool providers (and chose Borland).

No, it's not. Do Slashdotters really believe this? Clang/LLVM is the driving free-as-in-speech compiler suite these days.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Clang is the up-and-coming challenger, and it looks pretty inevitable that it's going to win eventually. But the world moves slower than you might like. Right now, clang is so far from taking over from GCC that it's not even funny.

Just because Apple uses something doesn't mean it dominates everything else in the world. Everywhere I look that isn't Apple, I see either GCC or ICC. In much of industry, people are only just starting to migrate from old vendor compilers to GCC as part of the slow ongoing UNIX-to-Linux shift.

I gave up on KDE when I discovered it is practically impossible to copy my settings from one computer to another.

Having a highly-customizable experience is great until you buy a new box and discover you're either going to waste hours reproducing your customizations manually, or try to copy things, have it break, and experience the hell of grepping for hardcoded paths in undocumented XML soup.

That's when I realized I wasn't even using much more than the window manager and the panel anyway, so I switched to FVWM2, whose configuration is stored in a single human-readable text file, and had a setup that was even more to my tastes, cloned across all my computers, in minutes.

KDE is undoubtedly awesome, but simplicity is also a feature, and it's one that the monolithic environments cannot provide -- by design.

The 4-digit PIN normally only applies to buttons that you push with your finger, where brute-force attacks are not really an option. If your bank has ATMs that permit 10,000 attempts before they swallow the card, or uses a 4-digit PIN as a password for their online services, I suggest you take your money elsewhere.

Does anyone here encipher their paper mail?

lgnge nfiax paavb fxvzv abval agrrh rcjnf zvarp rnrfy agrgj
zvpju rrgrr rnirr qfvvy bfrcn pbfun lgbur oofqf ffbqp vggrz
hrwug vfprn tcagp pupee buegr vnrnf nxpty lhrau nyoay oheva

Does Chrome have the ability yet to make text a readable size without widening the page so I have to scroll sideways?

Does it have the ability to selectively stop/play animations?

No? Then I'll be sticking with Firefox a while longer, I guess. Come back when your browser's accessible and then we'll talk.

You have some powerfully tinted rose-colored goggles if you want OS X to look like OS 9.

The desktop, perhaps.

The Finder, on the other hand ...

I'm looking forward to someone/some company doing something truly original.

"There is nothing new under the sun" -- some old guy who lived thousands of years ago.

Not much has changed since then.

Even the iPad is pretty much just one of those things they were using in Star Trek in the 1960s, which in turn were straight extrapolations from the clipboard, which in turn bears a remarkable functional resemblance to the clay tablets used to record the Epic of fucking Gilgamesh way back before Solomon even observed the general absence of novelty in the world.

"Innovation" means "being first to market with the obvious idea everyone is working on." It always has. Look how many people "invented" the light-bulb, or the airplane, or the tele(vision|phone), all at the same time, so their respective countries of residence have spent the last 150-odd years arguing patriotically over who reached the patent office first (hint: it was probably Edison, who literally worked there).

"Something truly new" does not, cannot, exist. It is a myth. When Apple claim to have invented something new, what they mean is that they have taken an old idea, polished it slightly, and will now use their impressive marketing machinery to make people want to buy it. This is clever, impressive, and has contributed significantly to our society's evolution in recent years, but it is not "innovation".