Australia's balance of trade with China is extremely positive at the moment. China buys almost twice as much Australian stuff as Australia buys Chinese stuff, as opposed to trade with the US which is 3-1 in the red. So, hao hao xuexi ba.

Its not like they could have just said Critical update patch...oh no, we need to make things confusing.

What happens when admins get confused and pour the contents of their beverage containers into their servers?

We apologize for the confusion in the Critical Patch Updates. The individuals responsible have been sacked. To avoid further confusion, all CPUs will be processed through CUPS, the Critical Update Patch Server.

And now the goddamn printer doesn't work.

The reason C++ does not implement format strings is that C libraries work just fine in it.

There are no prizes for most pure usage of <iostream> or any rule saying C++ programmers must use it at all, it is simply a nifty library that exists that you may use when it suits you. If the code you're writing will be simpler, faster and or more comprehensible to later maintainers if you use <cstdio>, then you should use it. If it can be written better with <iostream> then use that.

If you get a chance to do some hardcore IO in C++, you will find two functions at the core of your code: select (or epoll on Linux) and mmap. Neither are in either of those two headers and both work on integer file descriptors, rather than FILE or ostream/istream objects. They are about as un-c++ as you can get, they are kernel syscalls, but you can build some truly excellent C++ around them which looks simple, does a lot and runs more efficiently than <fstream> allows.

C++ is not about purity, Bjarne Stroustrup designed it to allow multiple unrelated paradigms to be used together to allow programmers maximum efficiency and flexibility to write great code, it was never meant to be deconstructivist. Good C++ is not just knowing when to pass by reference, what to declare const, which members to make pure virtual, which STL type to use, which functions and classes should be templates and which shouldn't, etc. Good C++ is also knowing when to use stringstream and when to use strnprintf. And good friend malloc is still there, believe it or not, great C++ programmers know how to use it well in C++ too.

How is this not an act of war?

Same reason nothing the Soviets ever did was an act of war: because retaliation would be too costly.

Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only make more time-consuming work, it'd be silly for some Machiavellian Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.

Au contraire. Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only generate more filing fees, it'd be Machiavellian for some silly Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.

Mbeki is great by ANC standards, the new guy, Zuma banged a girl he knew had HIV without a condom, but confidently re-assured the nation that he showered well afterwards.

Assholes is a very subjective term. I know plenty of guys who are frequently labelled "assholes" who write brilliantly clear, extensible code to deadline, mentor others and drive groups of people forward as a team. They are labelled assholes by the people who don't complete tasks, push both work and blame onto others and shirk responsibility. Brilliant and hard working people have very high standards and very rarely afford civility to those who willingly fall short and thus are perceived as assholes by them.

I worked in a company where people would regularly curse a guy who resigned a year before I arrived, saying he's a giant asshole, he wrote unmaintainable code, he used perverted coding conventions, blah blah blah. I thought it was strange since I noticed his name all though the commit log with more than double the work output of everyone else and more or less the same quality code. I met him afterwards and the guy was clever, articulate, polite and we discussed his code. He humbly acknowledged that he had written that code in a rush under pressure and was very surprised that it was still there in its entirety and nobody had bothered to revise it with something more permanent. He also explained to me his slightly unorthodox coding conventions (antonyms having the same number of letters to make definitions line up) and they made a bit of sense too, as much as anyone else's conventions. You see, people didn't like him, not because he was selfish or abusive or whatever, just because he was better than them and he wouldn't waste his time mentally masturbating with them when there was a deadline looming.

I realise now, "asshole" tends to work both ways.

MSE is good for what it is and what it does, I first tried it after reading unanimous praise of it here on Slashdot. It's the only AV I've ever seen that does not conspicuously cause the system to become slow, unstable and/or quirky.

I am feeling smug about this and is not about Microsoft or Windows itself, I just simply could not understand how a professional sysadmin could ever be in a position where they must run anti-virus on a server, which seems to be common practice amongst Windows admins.

Antivirus is for checking that executables and libraries are free of malicious code. I just cannot possibly fathom why an executable or library could be running on a server if nobody had checked it beforehand. A good admin should scan and monitor tools that come from untrusted sources before putting it on a live server. A great admin should scan and monitor tools, even if they're from trusted sources before putting it on a live server. This is basic stuff and is why almost all servers are infected through network bugs, which can be easily prevented by keeping services up to date and non-essential services shut down or at least firewalled off.

Why then do you need an Anti-Virus? It won't protect your services from buffer overflows or other infection vectors, it won't protect you from new rootkits unless it has wicked-sick heuristic analysis and you get lucky. So what does it guard against? Maybe someone using a zero-day attack vector and installing an old rootkit?

So for a sense of security against unknown threats, you give an autonomous, externally controlled process, that is by design almost impossible to analyse, unfettered administrator access to your entire system. Now this happens, I feel smug.

Sarah Kerrigan is from Starcraft, from 15 years ago, she's a terran ghost that becomes Zerg. Booker DeWitt is the protagonist from Bioshock Infinite, which came out three weeks ago and is fantastic.