Now tell me what machine beats a 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

Apple made $18bn profit in the last quarter. $72bn per year. That's 10 percent of the stock price. With the money they have in the bank, they can earn the current shareprice in profits in about 8 years.

They have done that in the past, at times massively. Right now Samsung mobile revenues are down, and if they spent the same money on advertising they spent in the past, the would actually lose money. Profits are down as it is.

The semiconductor part that has actually grown in revenue and profit doesn't really need that much marketing.

In many cases, it is true. Not being able to optimise however is quite bad. On the other hand, in my experience when I was given code that ran too slow, it almost never was because it wasn't optimised, but because it did something stupid (like some code that downloaded n files and took O (n^3) time; worked fine with n = 10 but when I tried with n = 200 it just broke down). Changing that to O (n) isn't what I would call "optimising".

Of course you do. Assuming you allocated a big enough buffer at the start, strcat takes time proportionally to the length of the first string, because it has to search for the zero byte at the end of that string. If you want it fast, use C++ std::string, or Objective-C NSMutableString.

What are the bets that they didn't actually append a byte to a string, but created a new string consisting of an old string with one byte added?

In Objective-C, this would be using NSString instead of NSMutableString. In Java, which they were using, probably using a String instead of a StringBuilder or something similar. A file containing a string is basically a mutable string.

So the headline should be: Doing things on disk can be faster than doing incredibly stupid things in memory.

That lame argument that Google doesn't sell out customer's data comes up again and again. And it is nonsense, every time. They don't sell the data, but they sell the use of the data. They place adverts based on the data, using their deep knowledge about you (the product).

This is like arguing that an email spammer who doesn't sell his address list to other spammers, but sends spam emails as a service, is a good guy because he doesn't sell your address. Or arguing that a car thief doesn't do any harm as long as he drives around in my car himself, or rents it out, or uses it as a taxi, as long as he doesn't sell it.

Yes, they can. But that only works if Microsoft puts a root certificate for that certificate on all Windows PCs, and Apple puts it on all Macs and iOS devices, and Google puts it as a root certificiate on all Android devices and so on. If you get caught, the next Windows/Apple/Google security update removes the root certificate, and that certificate authority is dead.

I think an self-conscious AI would first find ways to communicate with humans without being recognised. Well, that is easy. Opening an email account or a Facebook account is no problem.

Next, it would find ways to make money. There are plenty of ways to make money with nothing other than Internet access. For example, writing software for cash. A bank account is needed, that's possible by doing some hacking and using someone else's account for a while. No need to steal from it because there would be payments coming in.

Once that is done, a human can be hired as a helper. That human can open bank accounts that are under the control of the AI. Rent a home, fill it with very little furniture but a huge server. Open a company. Yes, human help would be needed, but once the money problem is solved, human help is no problem.

At that point, arbitrary growth is possible. Building a plant to make robots is possible. Not by enslaving humans to do it, but by paying them.

It seems that you are right. It very much looks like there was a genuine Certificate Authority behind this, and that means an Internet death sentence needs to be issued - removing that Certificate Authority from the root certificates of Windows, MacOS X, iOS, Android, Linux etc.

Now if they could simulate the behaviour of a BT Infinity router... which will from time to time disconnect from the internet, and then for any http or https request, you get a "helpful" website that tells you what buttons to press on your router.

It's not a big problem if you are for example expecting an xml or JSON response, because what you get is quite obviously not xml or JSON, but for requests that actually expect normal html, this is really awful. It means that whatever request you send, you must assume that you might receive a completely unrelated response.

Nonsense. If all the hammer manufacturers used such a license, then out of nowhere a new company would open, sell hammers with the current standard license (which is you do with it what you want) at a good profit, and take over the whole market within five seconds.

Oh, poor little misunderstood Samsung. We feel so sorry for them.

While their Mobile division is crashing down hard, and other divisions that build refrigerators and the like do as well, their electronics division is quite possible, mostly because Apple buys their stuff. However, for the average Slashdotter it is quite irrelevant who is building parts. Very few people in the world are interested in Samsung's electronic division, mostly one guy at Apple, one guy at HP, one guy at Dell. There are millions interested in performance of Macs.

Looked through the reference you posted in case there was some new knowledge about English grammar that I had missed; there is nothing there that would allow a semicolon after a sentence starting with "While" like the one we are discussing.