The AC system expels hot air through a small thermal exhaust port, about 2m wide. In order to access it, we'll have to drive really fast down Main St.

On *NIX systems you will usually get a segfault. I'm not sure if you will *always* get a segfault. The term "segfault" is specific to *NIX. On Windows it was called "invalid page fault" and I don't know what old school Apple stuff called it. That's beside the point.

The truly heinous bugs don't come from accessing memory outside your allotted segments anyway. They come from accessing memory within your allotted segments in erroneous ways. This leads to stuff like, "Hey, the 2nd time I called that function the structure's 2nd element had a different value, even though I did nothing to the structure". You know the bug is someplace else, potentially anywhere in the program where you could have walked off the edge of the sidewalk.

How does the Tor Project get safe harbor? They're not an ISP.

In that case, it gets thrown out one step sooner, since they're even less involved than an ISP would be.

Normal humans are excluded from writing good software. Abnormal humans are excluded by HR. Hence the complaint, "We have a shortage of programmers".

having a generation of students that don't know how to use pointers seems, rather scary to me.

Just a quick googling reveals that Python has "list index out of range" errors. So. The difference is one of consequence, not of type. In C you get undefined behavior.

Yes, it would be good for the new generation to have some "to the metal" experience; but it's not that great a loss. If they have to go there, you can simply tell them that going out of range is much more of a PiTA. The new languages protect them somewhat; but the concepts are still there.

IMHO all this tech is basically good, but I should point out that I also consider a large wooden horses to be basically good things, too. (They can be neat works of art, or convenient sources of fire wood.) That doesn't mean I'm saying you should wheel all the ones you find, through your city gates! There are other issues besides the utility value of wooden horses. It's the tech that should be celebrated, not necessarily all the products that use it. Tech and products are two very different things, even if related.

There's a pretty easy way to judge the ads for this stuff: what protocols does the product speak? Do you already have software in your repo that speaks that protocol?

And of course, you don't necessarily have to use someone else's service to get the device to work, right? (I'm not even saying you necessarily shouldn't use their service, but if you have to then the product is almost certainly garbage.)

I hear the pubic school system is also run by Foxconn beings. There takeover began when spell checkers was installed.

Nice. "Darn it, this amusingly tiny-capacity obsolete tape drive isn't powering up. I must have forgotten to bring its .. uh .. [glance around suspiciously] battery. But I paid $800 for it in 1996! *sigh* Ok, TSA agent, you can have my tape drive.. and .. oh no! My ink jet printer isn't working either! You mean I forgot both batteries!? Dammit! So much for printing those colored pie charts on the plane for my .. uh .. presentation. Boy are your kids going to be happy Xmas morning. [glare slightly unconvincingly at TSA agent]"

[Later, on Xmas morning] "Here you go, Billy. You were a bad boy. I never loved you."

[But Billy turns out to be cool] "Whoa! I can salvage the head servo and reel motor from this tape drive, and build something nifty with my Arduino! OMG, does this printer have a stepper motor?"

I think this idea is getting up into the "three birds, one stone" territory.

Tried to read the first book. Barely literate drivel.

Sometimes people need a little help. Often (but not always!) they'll half-suspect the problem, and will prefix their remark with "is it just me, or..."

You didn't do that, but I'm going to be a pal and pretend you did, and then answer the question for you:

Yes, it's just you.

Newsblur has been more than fine for my RSS feeds. Fast, non-douche based (meaning he’s not going to mine the info and sell it) ownerlove it.

It was related to me by my father, who was probably told this by *his* father. In regards to the mining town where they lived until my father was 4. People would take home a little dynamite from the mine, much in the way office workers might grab a stapler or some pens. They'd blow it up on the 4th. I guess management didn't mind too much on that one day. They probably did the same thing. Talk about a different era! We're talking almost 100 years ago now. This would be near Uniontown, PA by the way. Does anybody else with roots in that area have similar stories handed down?

Well said. Mere ownership of property isn't hoarding. Hoarding is cornering the market.