Just so long as you're aware that "erase everything" is useless against law enforcement, who start by shutting down your system and cloning the drive, then booting your machine off of the clone. In fact, it's worse than useless, because it qualifies as attempting to destroy evidence, and is trivially provable by comparing the original to the clone. So you'll go to jail just for trying that.

Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.

Of course, if one were the sort of person who would build a self-destructing USB stick, it would make more sense to just store part of the encryption key in a RAMDisk. Rebooting the computer wouldn't make any difference, but the rules of evidence require them to shut down the system to clone the drive, so when they ask you if you can decrypt the drive, you can honestly say, "No. You destroyed the key when you shut off the computer."

Of course, you'll probably want to have a backup copy of the key somewhere, in some form, or at least a means of reconstructing it, but because you would only use it if you actually had to shut your computer all the way down, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a place that's easily accessible, nor any place where someone would realistically look. It could, for example, involve walking around the city in a particular pattern known only to you, and typing in the text of all the graffiti you see....

This is where you learn to write automation code so that you are doing lots of work even when you're reading Slashdot. :-D

I wrote a partial C language interpreter in Perl once. Trust me, you can write code that's a lot more complex than a simple text transform. With that said, you don't write that sort of code like you'd write a script. You write it like you'd write a large C/C++ library or framework....

I've never had a drive that did emergency parking until my HD-based MacBook Pro. All my dead drives were too dumb to have the needed sensors, as were the machines that they were in.

With that said, I'm terrified at the aggressiveness with which that MacBook Pro parks its heads. I literally can't pick the thing up and place it gently on my bed without the heads doing an emergency park. I don't have a lot of faith in that drive lasting very long. Non-emergency parking is hard enough on the heads. Emergency parking is downright bad.

Except that bleach resistance is starting to show up in cholera.

Yikes.

Just as long as by "implementation-defined", you mean NaN and not, for example, 0. :)

I understand but disagree. Any language can be a write-only language if you don't care about maintainability. Then there are the wannabe gurus that save 3 lines of code not to shorten the program but to impress others. Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple. If you ever worked in a team of programmers with varying skills then you appreciate simple, readable code. You also will once you had to take over unreadable code.

To paraphrase the famous adage: A C programmer can write C in any language; a bad programmer can write Perl in any language.

Oh my God! Is PERL really competing for worst language with Brainf*ck? After reading the article on the operator mentioned, I can only assume so. I can't believe with all of the syntax backward-compatibility crap they've bolted on they couldn't just have cleaned up the syntax. Thus, my assumption is the only reasonable explanation. Or maybe brain damage... I hear you get that from PERL.

No, it's actually more of a vicious cycle. Bad coders write bad Perl, which leads to brain damage, which results in worse code. If you have an array with five or six indices, unless you're doing some sort of borderline insane physics computation, you're already solidly in WTF territory. Most sane people try to limit their arrays to about two indices. Three is unusual. Beyond that limit, you should almost always be assigning explicit variable names to the components, and not working with them as arrays. And that limit applies to associative arrays and data structure chain references, too. If you're going more than about two or three steps out, there needs to be a named variable in there somewhere so that the code will be maintainable.

Indeed; the compiler's even allowed to assume signed integer overflow doesn't happen, which is where you get into trouble.

Translation: In their attempt to make the spec as portable as possible, they gave compiler writers too much freedom. Honestly, the first time I heard about this problem... maybe a decade ago... my immediate reaction was, "Why don't they just change the spec to say that those optimizations aren't allowed?"

I still maintain that tightening the C spec is the correct fix, and that all the monkeying around with checking to see if the computation would overflow by subtracting one operand from or dividing one operand into INT_MAX and comparing the result against the other operand is just silly. After all, a sufficiently smart compiler, given the assumption that integer overflows are impossible, should optimize out those pre-tests anyway, by virtue of the fact that you're about to add them, and integer overflows are impossible. And it wastes a tremendous number of CPU cycles doing throwaway computation for no reason other than working around the C spec being utterly and completely brain damaged.

They're not becoming resistant to our germ killing soaps and lotions...

Actually, they are. Resistance to triclosan (one of the more popular germ killing agents used in soaps and lotions) is on the rise. The triclosan-resistant MRSA strains are particularly disconcerting, as they make disinfection in hospitals a lot harder. And given that the epidermal varieties of staph are showing increaed triclosan resistance while S. aureus (which is mostly found inside the body) isn't, there's little question at this point that the widespread use of triclosan in soaps has resulted in evolutionary selection for triclosan resistance in methicillin-resistant staph.

Sorry, but that's etymologically incorrect. Mayday (with no space) is derived from French "m'aidez", meaning "Help me". It is an internationally recognized distress call that dates back almost a hundred years. The fact that socialists latched onto the preexisting "May Day" holiday (which dates back thousands of years) and turned it into the Eurasian equivalent of Labor Day results in an unfortunate name collision.

Because there's nothing to stop an incumbent from getting publicity during an electoral cycle just by doing his job and making the news.

Actually, there is, and it is enshrined in communications law, but thirty years of weak, ineffectual FCC commissioners has mostly gutted it, between the removal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the consistent failure to enforce the equal time rule....

Meg Whitman spent more on her campaign than any other non-presidential candidate. She lost. Money certainly helps, but plenty of elections are won by the less well funded candidate.

Ironically, she was too well known to win in California. To be precise, most Californians had actually used eBay by the time she ran, and nobody wanted someone who could create that kind of train wreck to be in charge of the entire state. :-)

Are there autism-related charities capable of putting forth the $150 million [fastcompany.com] typically required to pay for FDA's approval?

Why would they need approval? I think Suramin is already approved and on the market as an antimicrobial/antiviral medication for treating certain diseases, so ostensibly doctors can just prescribe it off-label. AFAIK, the only reason to get FDA approval would be so that the manufacturer would be allowed to actually market it as a treatment for autism.