Leaving aside the part of my brain that is trying to figure out whether you consider only a few showers a week acceptable or are just really fast about them, I've never understood the point of non-waterproof watches. The extra cost is trivial these days, and you don't have to worry about them in the rain, or the shower, or washing your hands, or swimming, or cooking, or... you get the idea. Granted, not everybody needs a watch good to 50m - I'm a SCUBA diver, but I have a dive computer so the watch is somewhat superfluous while diving - but you can get ones good for 10m (33' or so, about one extra atmosphere of pressure) easily enough. The last time I had a watch I had to take off when bathing I was... 8?

I do still have to take the thing off at the damn TSA checkpoints, but that's the only times I have taken it off for years now. I think the battery is about eight years old?

Wow! You are *multiple* kinds of moron! Very impressive. Please don't breed.

1) You can't prove anybody is "about" to do something of their own volition. By your (idiotic) reasoning, I should be permitted to walk down the street with a loaded pistol in each hand, pointing one at anybody who gets within twenty feet of me or makes eye contact. After all, you can't prove I'm going to shoot anybody who doesn't attack me first!
2) Even if you can establish a reasonable proof that somebody *intended* to do something criminal, that doesn't actually constitute proof E "really was about to do something." For example, suppose my buddy and I have a fantasy about raping a woman, then cutting her up an eating her. He starts dating this lady. I start buying chains and knives and cutting utensils. My buddy and I exchange emails wherein we discuss our plan: he'll bring her over for a barbecue at my place, we'll slip something into her drink, then we'll chain her down and so on. We set a date and get her agreement to come along; I buy the drugs. At the agreed-upon time, he shows up at my place with the discussed victim. Assuming I have ground beef and bus in the fridge, can you *prove* I'm not just going to change my mind and just grill up some really good burgers instead?
3) Establishing proof is the responsibility of the court system. You arrest people on a reasonable suspicion. Now, I'm of the opinion that the justice system needs to compensate those it arrests when they're innocent (in the sense of making sure they get their stuff back and covering the value of anything lose due to the arrest), and that arrests made *without* reasonable suspicion should result in the officer(s) in question being arrested or at least strongly disciplined themselves, but that doesn't seem to be the way the government wants to run things.
4) Even regarding things in the past, there's generally no such thing as proof of who committed a crime. If I watch a guy shoot somebody, make a citizen's arrest until the cops get there, and they take him away... can I truly confirm that the person sitting handcuffed across the courtroom from me two weeks later is the same person I watched kill another person? I mean, he looks about the same as he did at the time, and he may have the same fingerprints as the guy the cops booked back then and as were found on the murder weapon... However, I don't know he doesn't have a twin or other person who just looks very similar, I don't know that the cops actually fingerprinted the right guy, I don't know whether he was using a silicone layer or something to give false fingerprints, even if I could compare the fingerprints myself I don't have the training to tell how much is typical variation between multiple readings of the same person and therefore have to take somebody else's word for it being the same even though I don't know if that person has been bribed or otherwise has an incentive to lie or is even competent to make that call themselves... True proof is impossible. That's why laws have defined terms like "a preponderance of evidence" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" and so on when discussing what it takes to convict people.

I have friends or family on at least four different continents at any given time, and my parents are currently somewhere in Indonesia (I'm in the continental US). We keep in tough all the time... by email, IM, Skype, Google Voice numbers, and other zero-cost options. The last time I had to send an actual SMS to an international number was while I was in Finland and meeting a friend at the train station, and the cost was minimal. There was no $10 initial fee, either. Maybe that only applies if you're not already in the target country?

Relatedly, sending or receiving message with people in the US was free no matter where I went in Europe, from France to Estonia. I used well over a thousand messages, many of them MMS, on that trip. No extra charges for them. I also got data (throttled but without any cap I ever found in the course of a month) for free (well, as part of the standard plan; I didn't pay extra for it). That was excellent for IM and email, and also worked for Skype voice calls (and for looking up directions, finding restaurants, booking hotels, streaming music, updating apps, and so on).

That was all on TMoUS's standard $50/mo no-contract unlimited plan, which includes international roaming in most of the world (not just Europe). It's a really fantastic deal.

Correct! It would be a remarkably stupid stack canary (which is a security measure) otherwise. Since the value would be the same on everybody's computer, you'd only need to find it once and then when you overflow the buffer be sure to write the canary value back as it was!

Instead, getting past stack canaries is considerably more difficult than that. It's possible, of course, with the right vulnerabilities... but it's *harder* and sometimes a program that would be exploitable without them (using the vulnerabilities known at the time) just isn't exploitable with them.

The summary's description of PFS is a complete clusterfuck, of course (this is /. so *obviously* the summary is going to be technically inaccurate, right?). Yours (LordLimecat) is more accurate, but the full concept isn't that hard so I'll explain it below.

First, some quick basics of TLS (I'm leaving out a lot of details; do *NOT* try to implement this yourself!):

• A server has a public key and a private key for an asymmetric cipher, such as RSA.
• When a client connects, the server sends their public key to the client. The public key is used to authenticate the server, so the client knows their connection wasn't intercepted or redirected.
• The client can also encrypt messages using the public key, and only the holder of the private key (the server) can decrypt those messages.
• Because RSA and similar ciphers are slow, TLS uses a fast, symmetric cipher (like AES or RC4) for bulk data.
• Before bulk data can be sent, the client and the server need to agree on a symmetric cipher and what key to use.
• The process of ensuring that both parties have the same symmetric key is called Key Exchange.
• Obviously, the key exchange itself needs to be protected; if the key is ever sent in plaintext, an attacker can decrypt the whole session.

Here's the scenario where PFS matters, and why it is "perfect":

• SSL/TLS (same concept, just different versions of the protocol really) is being used to secure connections.
• An attacker (think NSA) has been recording the encrypted traffic, and wants to decrypt it.
• The attacker has a way to get the private key from the server (a bug like Heartbleed, or possibly just a NSL).

Here's where it gets interesting:

• Without PFS (normal SSL/TLS key exchanges), the key exchange is protected using the same kind of public-key crypto used to authenticate the server. Therefore, without PFS, our attacker could use the private key material to either decrypt or re-create the key, and decrypt all the traffic.
• With PFS, the key exchange is done using randomly generated ephemeral (non-persistent) public and private parameters (Diffie-Hellman key exchange). Once the client and server each clear their private parameters, it is not possible for anybody to reconstruct the symmetric key, even if they later compromise the server's persistent public/private key pair (the one used for authentication).

It is this property, where the secrets needed to recover an encryption key are destroyed and cannot be recovered even if one party cooperates with the attacker, which is termed Perfect Forward Secrecy. Note that PFS doesn't make any guarantees if the crypto is attacked while a session is in progress (in this case, the attacker could simply steal the symmetric key) or if the attacker compromises one side before the session begins (in which case they can impersonate that party, typically the server). It is only perfect secrecy going forward.

Relatedly, T-Mobile US doesn't charge for texts at all. None of their plans in the last year or so *don't* including unlimited SMS/MMS, and lot of their earlier ones had unlimited messages too.

TMo also shows the breakdown in your monthly bill very clearly, including showing how each item (and the total) has changed in cost from one month to the next. So for example, when I added a new line to my plan, it was immediately and extremely obvious how much that cost me, and why. There's no way they could slip in a $10 charge under the noise; their own billing page wouldn't have anywhere to hide it. They could stick it under something like "regulatory and service fees" but then that category would double from one month to the next, which would be extremely obvious on the little month-to-month bar graphs they show.

You know, maybe if you'd quoted entire sentences, you wouldn't look like an idiot while trying to contradict me.

Just like how 32-bit-only versions of Windows - which describes every version from Windows 95 until XP 64-bit edition - can run 16-bit apps

Win9x had 16-bit pieces, but it required a 32-bit CPU. In the context of this entire thread, that defines it as a 32-bit-only OS. Everything NT6.2 (including XP x64) and forward has supported 64-bit or 32-bit installs, thus is *not* 32-bit-only.

You flunk reading comprehension or something?

Anyhow, anybody running software that old is going to already have a system set up for doing so; they aren't going to be Installing Win9 on those machines most likely anyhow. As for "companies generally load 32-bit OSes on their PCs..." I'll admit that my experience is limited to mostly the more tech-savvy companies out there, but as a consultant I've seen a *lot* of company's computers, and not one of them was running a 32-bit OS as their primary (there was one that still ran XP a year and change back, but it was 64-bit). Of course, I'm working with engineer and developer machines, so maybe that makes the difference. Anyhow, adding an extra thunking/compatibility layer for running 16-bit code on 64-bit OSes sounds logical from an engineering perspective, but it makes very little sense in terms of finances or developer time.

Insert the (technically a spoof, but close enough) movie Galaxy Quest, and it works out again! Nemesis becomes #11, ST 2009 becomes #12, and Into Darkness becomes #13 (which is about right).

What other disadvantages do you ascribe to it? It doesn't take up meaningfully more space than the menu bar would (it takes significantly *less* space than a menu bar plus a single toolbar), it is still navigable with a keyboard, it doesn't override existing keyboard shortcuts for specific actions (from Ctrl+S to Ctrl+Shift+=), it is still hierarchically organized and also still supports expanding (sub)menus for high option density where needed, it scales to multiple resolutions and window sizes better than menus do, it makes it easy to see what the effect of an action will be before you click, and there's still a customizable toolbar for commands you want to hit with the mouse in one click from anywhere.

These all seem like wins vs. the menu bar system...

WHY are you powering down a desktop, never mind cutting its power off?? I mean, I can understand rebooting (which it does pretty damn fast - well under a minute to get back to the login screen on my system, and a good chunk of that is BIOS status displays - so I'm skeptical of your "four minutes" complaint) when needed, but powering down even without disconnecting power is an edge case scenario these days (use Suspend, or Hibernate if you need to) and cutting the power cord is an extremely rare need (also, you can hibernate if needed).

Even in the case that this is something you legitimately need to do, your complaint is stupid. Just wait until the power light on the case goes out (and the fans spin down, which is easy to *hear* even if you aren't looking at the case) before cutting the power!

64-bit OS can run 32-bit processes (do you live under a rock or something?). Just like how 32-bit-only versions of Windows - which describes every version from Windows 95 until XP 64-bit edition - can run 16-bit apps. 64-bit-only doesn't mean it won't run a 32-bit app, it means it won't run on a processor which lacks 64-bit support. There are few such processors in use on PCs today, and they're on their way out. Even Atom chips, for a long time the holdout 32-bit x86 CPUs, support x64 these days. By 2015 it won't matter (seriously legacy machines can continue running legacy OSes; the OSes will probably outlive the machines).

Now, 64-bit OSes can't run 16-bit apps directly - the processor won't drop two levels like that - but 16-bit apps are cheap on CPU power so the tiny number that ever still need to be run (I'm mostly thinking games from the DOS days) can be easily emulated (which is exactly what DOSBox does on x64 today... and also on smartphones and such). 64-bit OSes also won't load 32-bit kernel-mode drivers, but that's not a big problem anymore; very little hardware still in use lacks a 64-bit driver, and if it does, it probably doesn't run on 32-bit Win8 anyhow so Win9 is out of the question.

The Finns I know would resent the implication heavily, in fact. As far as I can tell, darn near the entire mobilization of the Finnish military is on the Russian border, and (according to a Finnish friend of mine) Finland came in on the side of the Axis during WW2 primarily because Germany was opposing Russia.

It's very much related to the engine: the car is a deathtrap because the ultra-lightweight body is unsafe. If you put in the safety features and body strength needed to bring the car up to modern safety standards, that 55HP engine wouldn't cut it anymore, and your fuel economy would go down even if it did.

Modern engines produce more CO2 - that's pretty much a direct function of the amount of gasoline burned - but produce fewer other pollutants. There are an increasing number of PZEV cars out there, for example; they produce more carbon dioxide than your car, but less (effectively nothing) of everything else. In most cases that's better, environmentally speaking.

Speaking as somebody whose newest car has one, you can have my backup camera when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I'd like to *install* them on a few other cars around me sometimes, but there's no way you're taking mine. I'd trade an awful lot of other features (many of which weigh many times as much) before I'd give that up.

The Xbox 360 isn't built on PC hardware, actually - PowerPC instruction set, a slightly weird 3-core hyperthreaded CPU. Admittedly it has a good clock speed, even today (3.2GHz IIRC) but that's no PC part and you can easily get laptops more powerful than that now (my desktop, which was admittedly built for gaming, blows it away - 8 cores at 4GHz, plus 32GB of RAM vs. 0.5GB). The graphics chip isn't PC-standard either, although it's made by a company that makes PC GPUs too...

Are you thinking of the Xbox One? That is much closer, performance-wise, to a typical PC and is indeed built on near-commodity PC hardware.