You are right, they are not the same thing. However, some pieces of hardware have no firmware instanlled and require the driver to upload it on boot. I have no idea if that's how nvidia cards work, but I know that years ago when I was using hauppauge analog tv capture cards, this was exactly the case. Instead of flashing the firmware to the card, it just gets loaded every time you reboot. In these cases, people passionate about open source are probably going to want to use open source firmware to go with their open source driver. Or perhaps using the closed source firmware with the open source driver isn't even an option. I really don't know.

Do your new hires routinely circumvent 2 layers of security mechanisms just to alter the values of Integer objects? Sounds like you have some shitty new hires. What you really should be teaching them is that, if they have an Integer object with a value of 2 and they want it to be 3, then rather than use the reflection API to bypass private and final modifiers and turning off the accessibility restructions, they could just do "new Integer(3)" or "Integer.valueOf(3)" and be done with it.

I'm sure as hell glad I don't have your shitty new hires working with me. Nor your stupid ass teaching/hiring my coworkers.

OK, if autoboxing is crap, then you should just consider it invalid to assign a primitive type to an object type. Thus I guess you made a coding error when you wrote the code that did autoboxing. Shame on you.

Now, back here in the real world, you went OUT OF YOUR WAY, even going so far as to explicitly circumvent 2 levels of security measure, just to FORCE the problem to occur. That's like claiming the scissors you bought are unsafe because they made you go blind when you jammed them into your eyes.

Sorry, but the autoboxing is completely safe unless you take explicit measure to attempt to make it unsafe. Don't go whining just because the language didn't protect you from yourself. It actually tried, but you told it not to. If you can't trust yourself not to be an idiot, then just run all of your code with an appropriate security profile in place and you'll be all set.

I'm not sure Id say this is "due to the nonsensical autoboxing syntactic sugar". This only works because you "hacked" the system.

1) You aren't allowed to modify the value of an Integer object, as the value is both private and final. You worked around that by using reflection to get at the object's variables in the roundabout way.
2) Even then, you wouldn't be allowed to modify it because of security restrictions. However, you also explicitly turned off the security restrictions.
3) The only reason you were even able to turn off the security restrictions is because you were running in an unmanaged environment. In that situation, it is assumed you have full access to do pretty much anything you'd like. However, if you were running in any sort of managed environment with a security manager installed, you wouldn't have been able to do that.

This is really not much different than C++, where it's assumed you have full access to everything. You can take a const, get a const pointer to it, cast that to a non-const pointer, and then modify it. Even if that constant value were stored in a non-writable code page, you could make the code page writable if you were running in an environment that allowed you to alter those permissions. I haven't done such a thing in a VERY long time, so I'm not sure if Admin access under windows these days gives you that level of access, but I'm almost certain linux root level would allow it.

I think all 3 of those were the same degree of closeness, just difference camera angles and zoom.

If you look at the shot at 0:52, you can really see there are only 2 ledges in the volcano. There is the really close one at the very edge of the lava, which you later see getting splashed with lava continuously, and at one point even see a piece breaking off. These guys clearly did not go to that one. Then there is another rim which is probably 80-90% of the way down. That's the one I'm pretty certain they filmed themselves standing on. According to their blog (http://www.stormchaser.ca/News.html) they repelled 1200 feet down to get there. So if my estimate of 80-90% is correct, then they are 100-300 feet above the lava surface at that point.

What sort of troll modded this insightful? Oh yeah, Obama golfs a lot. Well, maybe instead of the 3 or 4 iron, maybe Obama should go with the Crawford, Texas Ranch

There are plenty of facts there to be outrage about. Was he legally allowed to use the device while driving? Yes, but that doesn't mean he was legally prohibited from stopping before using it. If the nature of the communication was such that it was reasonable to give an immediate response, then pull the fuck over and respond. It's not like he's in pursuit of somebody. Just pull over, give your immediate response, then continue on your way.

Second, "the narrow roadway curved slightly to the left without prior warning"? Without prior warning? How the fuck does it do that? So he looked at the roadway, he sees it is perfectly straight, looks away, and then the road suddenly reshapes itself to curve slightly to the left? If the officer needs to look away from the road, he should first
1) get a good look ahead at the roadway
2) Identify any obstructions that may be coming up (such as parked cars, traffic cones/barricades, etc)
3) Identify anything or anybody that might get into his way in the next several seconds

Only once he's done all of the above and decides he's almost certain to be in the clear for the next several seconds, THEN he should look away, but not for more than a few seconds at a time. Even that is risky, but for anything more than just a few seconds, you absolutely can not know what you are about to encounter (unless you are on some divided highway in the middle of nowhere with few cars, and no entrance ramps around). He most certainly should NOT be looking away long enough for him to travel more than the distance he can see ahead. If he didn't see that curve, then either he didn't look very carefully ahead, or he had his head down for a VERY long time.

I also have issues with the guy having worked there for 16 years and not being familiar with at least the major roads. I understand he works for the county and not the city, but still. I think I can do better than that for the roads in my county, and I don't have a job where half the job description is practically 'driving for a living"

Furthermore, in the very first reply, somebody is already trying to port linux (to an amiga)

First, I think you are wrong. There has been a lot of progress, and although were are not yet CLOSE, we are CLOSER.

That said, how many hundreds of years did man spend trying to learn how to fly? Guess we should have given up on that pursuit a few hundred years ago.

Microsoft Chair - makes the internet so fast, it flies.

man gets lasik, news at 11

Rather than "actually" how about "I could theoretically care less"

And yet, here we are...looks to me like it DIDN'T get done.

See, the thing is, like I said I do, you DON'T have to wait 10 years. If you want to make it a policy to bump it up to 10 again EVERY year, then do that. You stay in the habit, but you've still got that huge buffer. Your policies and procedures would have to fail you 10 TIMES IN A ROW for it to even get to this point. It seems pretty likely to me that at SOME point in those 10 years, some sysadmin or manager would come along and say "so who handles domain renewals around here", and everyone would look at each other, and they'd figure it out these domain's have been neglected for 5 years, and then they'd be able to fix the problem before it was a problem.

Actually, 10 years is the max registration. And that's exactly what I do. Throwaway domains that I'm experimenting with might only get a year or 2, but once anything becomes important to my business, it gets renewed for 10 years. The same is true for my personal domain. And every couple years I go through and bump it back up to the max. I'd literally have to go 10 years without remembering to renew a domain before one would expire. I can't see why any business would do otherwise.

Nope:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/...