That sure explains why they ask you for your phone number, email address, rewards card, and whether you want to apply for a new credit card (while 5 more people are waiting in line behind you) every time you check out...

They don't have the power to take YOUR money. They have the power to take SOMEBODY's money. Whether or not their slick pitch works on you or not has no bearing on whether it works. You are tiny and insignificant.

Interesting. Still, I'm sure 90% of the folks who want iPhones would be happy to have the equivalent of an iPod Touch with a $15 GSM module added into it for $215...

I love how the iPhone is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as a $200 iPod Touch, except with a GSM/3G transceiver thrown in, and yet costs $450 more...

This is as misleading as the studies that "disproved" that organic food is more nutritious. Nobody was making the claim they disproved. The basic claim about Fox News' bias is that every single story is framed in such a way to reinforce a distorted, reactionary worldview, even when it's supposedly NOT an opinion piece.

It is potentially stupid, but the reason is much more subtle than most people realize. For all its limitations and headache, C does have one key feature that makes it suitable for kernel programming where most other languages are not: the concept of well-defined storage durations and reserving storage for an object. I really question whether Lua code running as part of the kernel can be made robust under out-of-memory conditions which a kernel must be able to survive.

If your installer is taking so long that the progress bar would be visible on the screen for more than 5 or 6 refresh cycles, you're doing something wrong and you should just give up.

No, copyright prevents that. Copyright cannot be assigned or transferred implicitly. It requires an explicit signed assignment or work-for-hire status for a party other than the author to claim copyright.

If you think your personal making-a-statement against "permission culture" is more important than the practical ability of others (including distributors) to use the code you produce without exposing themselves to legal risk, then you're part of the "permission culture" - you feel entitled to deny others permission to use your work.

If you want to make a responsible statement against "permission culture", release your work into the public domain, and include a one-clause BSD license for use in jurisdictions that don't recognize public domain.

With a shot, the pediatrician/nurse administers the shot and it's done. Anti-vax nuts can opt out, but at least there's a record of them having opted out in the child's medical history. With this patch, it sounds really easy for the anti-vax parent to go get it done to avoid suspicion/confrontation, then rip it off their kid as soon as they leave the doctor's office, resulting in a child whose medical history says they had a vaccine, but who never really got one.

I can think of one trillion-dollar industry that might be interested in knowing how to cause 'nonshivering thermogenesis' in fat cells on demand...

The class of computations for which this is possible is fairly worthless. It's not presently possible for anything with actual loops and flow control, and even if it were, timing vulnerabilities would leak tons of information.

Absolute usage, or relative? Their market dominance has surely eroded, and people who know what they're doing aren't using the old clunkers anymore.

Yes, in some ways I agree it is a "smear campaign", but I don't think it's an unjustified one. When a product has had vulns this serious this many times, yet maintains huge deployment due to market dominance and user lock-in, a huge smear campaign is needed to destroy it. This was the case in the past with products like BIND, Sendmail, WU-FTPD, IIS, IE, etc. and Java is just the latest necessary target.

In fairness, this is complicated a lot by two issues:

1. Many of the optimizations that help things like memcpy, memcmp, etc. are utterly wrong and backwards in any loop that actually DOES SOMETHING in its body; they only end up being optimal in the degenerate case where everything but the load and store is loop overhead and the optimal result is achieved by eliminating overhead. And on some CPU models such as most modern 32-bit x86's and some 64-bit ones, the optimal result is actually attained with a special instruction that's not usable in general for more complex loops (i.e. "rep movsb"). Factors like these make optimizing these specific functions in the compiler a task that's largely separate from general-case optimization, and when the main target libc is already providing the asm anyway, there's little demand/motivation to get the compiler to do something that won't even be used.

2. Distros want a binary library that can run optimally on all variants of a particular instruction set architecture. Relying on the compiler to optimize functions for which the optimal variant is highly cpu model specific would only give a binary that runs optimally on one model, unless a lot of logic is added to the build system to rebuild the same source file with different optimizations. This is not prohibitively difficult, but it's also not easy, and it's not worthwhile when the compiler can't even deliver the desired optimization quality yet.

Overall I agree that machine-specific asm in glibc (and elsewhere) is a disease that results in machine-specific bugs and maintenance hell, but when there are people demanding the performance and pushing benchmark-centric agendas, it's hard to fight it...