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Comment Re:So much Fail. Ignore. (Score 1) 315

Not only that, if you have a variable of a non-final class type or interface type in Java, you can also "change the type of data held by the variable when the program is running". E.g, without this property, it would be difficult to process items of polymorphic collections (i.e., collections allowing items of multiple types/representations simultaneously, which in Java happens to be the case of all collections, of course).

Comment Re:What makes this a gigafactory? (Score 1) 95

it's a way for them to name a plant so that it has obvious technological associations

It actually has obvious mythological associations, but feel free to limit yourself to physical units. In common speech, "megas" meant nothing more than simply "big", while "gigas" meant "a Giant". I guess the obvious English adjective would be "effing huge".

Comment Re:Bullets will not win this conflict (Score 1) 868

And yet Israel insists on controlling the territory. They may not get a vote but they ARE Israeli citizens until such time as Israel actually stops trying to control their political processes and truly leaves.

And Afghani are US citizens until the US actually stops trying to control their political processes and truly leaves. You logic is impeccable!

Comment Re:Radicalization (Score 2) 868

Yet in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, almost those 4.4 million people are under Palestinian civil administration, while only about 0.1 million people in the West Bank are in the Israeli civil administration. Perhaps the Israeli have an undue influence over a part of the West Bank, what with their security operations there, but claiming that "Israel rules Palestine" seems rather overblown. I might as well claim that the US rules Iraq and Afghanistan.

Comment Re:Oe noes! A compiler bug! (Score 2) 739

The reason that most extensions exist is that there is (or was) no way of implementing things that people want with standard C. Inline assembly is one example. All modern C compilers support it, but GCC and Microsoft's compilers use different syntax (most other compilers implement one or the other, sometimes both). Without it, you require that every time you want to use even a single instruction of platform-specific assembly code, you must write an entire function and call it.

Atomics were another big reason for extensions. Prior to C11, if you wanted atomic operations, you needed either assembly or non-standard compiler intrinsics. Efficient vector support is another one.

Comment Re:Or upgrade to llvm ... (Score 2) 739

While that's technically true, the Ada and Fortran front ends are both using DragonEgg, which is a GCC plugin that converts GIMPLE to LLVM IR. It doesn't work well with GCC 4.7 or newer, produces poor debug info, and is now largely unmaintained. There is a Flang project to produce an LLVM front end for Fortran, but it's very immature. The Ada Labs guys were looking at producing an LLVM front end for Ada, but I don't know that they got anywhere with it.

Comment Re:Laziness (Score 1) 150

The problem is worse on Android than on many other platforms because there are very few native shared libraries exposed to developer and there is no sensible mechanism for updating them all. If there's a vulnerability in a library that a load of developers use, then you need 100% of those developers to update the library and ship new versions of their apps to be secure. For most other systems, core libraries are part of a system update and so can be fixed centrally.

Comment Re:Not surprised (Score 1) 150

I doubt Apple has such a patent. Both of these were features of Symbian at least since EKA2 (over 10 years ago) and, I think, earlier. Apple may have a patent on some particular way of exposing this functionality to the UI, but that's about the most that they could have without it being shot down in court in 10 seconds (prior art that's in the form of a phone OS that millions of people owned is hard to refute).

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

Everything you ask for exists. The reason that Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox don't use them is that their entire business model depends on differentiation. If you could connect to their services with any third-party client that also worked with a server that you set up yourself and with their competitors' services, then their hold on the market becomes very tenuous. You're searching for technical solutions to business problems.

Comment Re:Advertised on YouTube? (Score 4, Interesting) 97

The 'you can skip in 5 seconds' ads amaze me. Presumably the people using them know that they have 5 valuable seconds that everyone can see, yet they uniformly squander them. I've almost never seen an ad that tells me anything interesting in the first 5 seconds, which isn't that surprising, but it's really surprising to me that most don't even tell me what the product is. Several that I've seen use the first 4 seconds to fade from black, then get 1 second of something incomprehensible before I hit skip.

Comment Re:umm duh? (Score 1) 176

Please correct me if I'm wrong because I may not have imagined this system properly. I was thinking the idea was that you encrypt each file with a single unique key, and then to use a public-key encryption scheme to encrypt that key. You can then send the encrypted file and the encrypted key to another user, knowing that it will need that users private key to decrypt.

Every time you upload a file, you generate a random symmetric key. You encrypt the file with this key and the key with your public key. If you want to download the file, you get the file and the encrypted key and then you decrypt the key with your private key and then decrypt the file. When you create the account, you upload your public key.

When you want to share a file with everyone, with no access control, you download the encrypted key, decrypt it, and provide it to the server. The server can then decrypt the file.

When you want to share a file with a limited set of users, you download each of their public keys (which you can cache in the client) and the encrypted symmetric key, decrypt the key, and then encrypt it once for each user. They will then only be able to access it with their client.

I'm not sure who you're 'we' as in 'internet community' is. We do have standards and off-the-shelf libraries for everything required to implement this and others have done so in the past (one of my colleagues during her PhD did back around 2006, to give one example, others have implemented more complex and flexible schemes more recently). Note that this is the simple textbook scheme for doing this kind of system. It's been implemented before and doubtless will be again. If you check the research literature then you'll find more interesting schemes.

The only problem is if you want to be able to access it from the browser, without some kind of plugin (Google actually does compile OpenSSL with Emscripten to do ASN.1 parsing, but I wouldn't recommend using it for encryption).

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