I am thinking that some sort of a white list for real towers, their signal and locations will need to be developed and actively maintained to stop this fucking abuse of power on the technology level.

On the individual rights level the fucking police state is completely destroying those with all of these unauthorised searches (which is what they are), the Constitution is used to wipe the fucking government officials asses.

(oh, and /. it's been 16 seconds since I pushed the 'reply' button, has it? I am a quick fucking typist, you morons).

As a coda to my post, consider this howler:

World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling

An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." ... The reprint will cost Penguin 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,500) ...

This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.

It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.

There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.

This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.

Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.

Jon Postel

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.

There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.

The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.

Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?

I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.

Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.

For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.

I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concerned, that's a matter for the layout engine, if it ends up being done at all. On the input side, it's just semantically wrong. All you get for it is a slight improvement of the visual tidiness on the printed page, at the cost (sometimes) of creating ambiguity in the reader's mind about whether the punctuation mark belongs to the quoted material, or not. Only a crazy person advocates at the same time for the Oxford comma (which averts ambiguity) and for end-quotation punctuation folding (which introduces ambiguity). Aesthetics or semantics? Make up your damn mind! (For myself, I use the Oxford comma as necessary and I make a point of being able to identify those cases.)

I'm sure most people sense that the argument in favour of standard usage as "just another style" mainly comes from people who wish to avoid effort and mastery rather than double down in the honourable spirit of Jon Postel.

So can an app.

Not really, i'm talking about chickens. Must have used a trigger word or something.

Ok, let me be perfectly clear: I am against any vilification of any group by anybody and I am also against grouping people into any types of groups in the first place, that's how you get socialist movements, fascist movements, any sort of movements that destroy individual liberties.

As I said, I have no love for Harper, but I don't have any love for anybody who promises to solve people's problems by creating special treatment for them, I am against all forms of collectivism, against any type of privilege. No, money shouldn't be stolen from a single person even if you push agenda of 'helping the poor' or 'kids' or whatever.

My position is that in order to have a working society you have to have a rule based society, where rules cannot be bent for anybody under any circumstances, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of any cry to arms based on any negative experiences of any particular group.

The system based on rules is an ideological system, because it does not give anybody any preferential treatment, doesn't promise anybody to help them or to save them from anything. But that's the only way to build a society that is stable and doesn't rely on stealing from some to give to others, it is not based on any feelings and it shouldn't be.

Societies are falling apart today because of all the group entitlements, feelings, desires for 'social justice', where the term 'justice' is so perverted that in reality it means slavery if you actually care to look. Slavery of some for the benefit of others. You can't have it without locking the people you want to enslave up and throwing away the key, but you can't do that while pretending to be just at all.

I have 0 issues with robocalls, senate, duffy, a couple of billions, gutting the environmental legislation, hopefully gutting anything that has anything to do with government subsidising anything, including any science whatsoever.

In fact I would say I like at least half of what he is doing, I would like to stop all forms of socialism, he is not stopping them though, he is creating new ones (any type of secret police crap or so called 'security' and wars, I completely disagree with that).

Democracy is a hydra and the mob is a vampire that gives hydra its power. Do I like Harper? No. I would rather have a libertarian and/or an anarcho capitalist and/or an objectivist who confirms to his ideology in the strongest way possible. That's how you get rid of crap that secret police, like so called 'security', wars, but also of any type of socialism and fascism.

So Harper started concentration camps and is throwing Jews and Gypsies in it, he is killing off the disabled and mentally handicapped? Maybe he nationalized something, maybe he is opposed to capitalism and private property ownership? Oh, wait, nationalization of private industry, like the health care sector in Canada happened under an actual nazi (AFAIC).

No, Harper may be many things but he is no Hitler. As to democracy - there hasn't been a more duplicitous system of government that promotes 'feel good' solutions while undermining the fundamental health of a nation through destruction of individual rights and creation of large, hydra-like government structures that actually destroy the economy and society.

" how the hens are kept that produce your eggs"

Er... What's wrong with ethical farming? It would be nice to think that you'd not need laws for that sort of thing, but apparently some countries need laws to stop people from discriminating against people with different colour skin so you can't leave everything to the marketplace.

Yes yes yes. But they also invent cures and treatments for diseases which blight or end the lives of billions of people (over time). Put down the Russell Brand dvd and signed t-shirt for a moment, and think about who exactly would produce a cure for HIV, cancer etc if everyone can just make copies of compounds the drugs companies produced (at no small cost). Let me guess - you're going to crowdsource it on kickstarter?

How often do we need to repeat this mantra to people?

Not quite so often as you think, if this is just an excuse to regard an accessible, but possibly degraded primary copy as worse than having no backup of your backup at all.

Having in my possession a ZFS backup with some corrupt nodes, I could still have a provable hash from the Merkle tree of the content desired, which I could recover from a corrupt primary copy (i.e. the live drive itself) with no concern whatsoever about the corruption, so long as the checksum matches.

Anything that can go wrong in a primary copy can pretty much also go wrong in a backup copy. Hot media is more likely to fail due to write errors (or overwrite errors) whereas cold media is poor at prompt notification of physical degradation.

The rule of Occam's orthogonality says don't brick the primary device unnecessarily.

Here's the best part: they can audit the security of nearly a half a million lines of code in "several months".

You don't need to look for kidney stones in bone marrow. Most likely what they are doing is better described by "screening" rather than "auditing" even though the later is the conventional word.

Algorithms (such as ciphers) tend to be fairly easy to cover with test suites, whereas memory management and handling of randomness sources are both fraught with peril and difficult to formally test.

It really helps to reduce audit coverage if your code analysis tools can eliminate big chunks of code as purely functional with no side-effects on system state. A purely functional function would not include code that performs heap-based memory allocation, and would exclude the vast majority of system calls.

Even so, I suspect there's a pretty steep gradient on where to direct your best attention to identify misguiding coding constructs (approaches that are worse than wrong)—if you're not determined to check for identify kidney stones lurking in bone marrow.

Need to learn to read,dude. Second sentence.

Very few things are "worth" what they cost. I mean, sure, on one level things are worth exactly what they cost. But on another level there's the cost of the raw materials and the labour required to assemble them, and the factory and its running costs etc. Do you include marketing? Shipping? R&D which is required up front but not to manufacture. A $600 smartphone costs $100 or so to build, and less after a while. What's it worth - $100 or $600? Is it "better" than a $100 smartphone? A smartwatch can keep time more accurately than a more expensive watch by simply correcting for any mistakes once a day. But when people spend any more than $100 on a watch it's not because they're after the accuracy.A lot of rather sad people are going to buy the Apple watch because they think they're in with a chance to be as cool as they think the people who got the first iPhones were. And the sort of people who spend $100,000 on a watch certainly aren't going to get one; not even the tasteless gold one (although i'm sure it'll go down a storm in the middle east and asia).