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Comment Get a free upgrade or a free replacement (Score 5, Interesting) 450

According to one article you can call them to complain and get a free upgrade to the version you need or send a scan of your receipt to H&R Block and get a free version of Tax Cut that has all the forms. Personally, I prefer the former so Intuit knows they have an unhappy customer serious enough to call them on these shenanigans.

Comment Re:Infamous Tor Network? (Score 5, Informative) 155

Why don't you watch the talk and find out?

Actually I'll just summarise it for you. If you run a lot of Tor nodes you will eventually get picked to host a hidden service directory. Then you can measure lookups for the entries of hidden services to measure their popularity, and crawl them to find out what's on them.

Comment Re:Obligatory (Score 2) 161

[Java took a very different approach to the problem of "how to we get rid of segfaults and memory corruption". Java basically banned all interesting use of the stack, forcing everything onto the heap, and barred developers from using RAII. Nowadays, with more advanced compilers able to do advanced lifetime analysis, we can reconsider languages - such as Rust - that take a less draconian approach.]

I think it's rather misleading to state that more advanced compilers have obviated the need for Java's approach.

Firstly, Rust doesn't solve automatic memory management like garbage collection does. Their solution appears to be basically smart pointers with move semantics + reference counting for the cases where data doesn't have a lifetime cleanly tied to scope. Well, great. It's back to the 1990's and COM. Reference counting notoriously cannot handle cycles, which are very common in real programs. Any tree structure where you want to be able to navigate both up and down, for example.

In addition to the difficulty of breaking reference cycles and preventing memory leaks in complex programs, refcounting also has poor performance especially if you want threads involved. Garbage collection has now been optimised (in good implementations like HotSpot) to the point where it's faster than refcounting.

If we start seeing teams of non-expert programmers writing large programs in Rust, you will see programs with memory leaks all over the place.

Additionally, you realise that Java compilers have got smarter over the years too, right? HotSpot can stack allocate objects in a bunch of different circumstances, when analysis reveals that it'd be safe.

Comment Re:Sounds suspiciously like welfare. (Score 4, Interesting) 109

Basic Income is welfare, not something that sounds like it. The difference between it and normal welfare is, everyone gets a basic income whether they want it or not. It's meant to be enough to live off.

The idea of a BI is a very old one. It has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, and I'm not sure what relevance cryptocurrency has (and I say that as a Bitcoin developer, so I'm a fan of CC in general). In theory a society rich enough to afford it would have moved to the oft-fictionalised post work utopia that you sometimes see in things like Star Trek. Because everyone gets it whether they want it or not, unconditionally, the basic income would be supposedly stigma free. Thus if you want to pursue things that are not very profitable but are beneficial to society nonetheless (production of art, charity, etc) then you could do that and not have to worry about being seen as a welfare sponger.

I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world. Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level. I see a BI as a useful goal to inspire people about the future rather than something practical for today.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 163

They aren't allowed to impersonate another company, I suspect that's rather the point. Look at the screenshot: the HTTPS indicator was crossed out. I guess you have to click through a big fat warning to get there ..... and I'm surprised it's even possible at all. I thought YouTube was SSL pinned. Maybe it's just google.com

Comment Re:Get What You Pay For (Score 1) 163

In all of my years of being a network engineer, I've never heard of managing bandwidth that way and can't think of why someone would mange bandwidth that way.

Me neither but we have no idea what kind of filtering system you can install onto a plane.

My guess is that they can't filter by DNS lookup for some reason (people's devices have cached answers?) but they can do SSL rewriting, and for big sites like anything Google runs IP address blocking isn't useful because all their sites share IPs. They know browsers and apps won't accept their fake certs, it's just a way to create an unbypassable error.

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