Memory is cheap. Sometimes it's just plain faster and simpler to allocate an oversize fixed-size-array than to mess with dynamically allocating and freeing memory.

Fixed size arrays explode if N ever gets above your array size. There are many cases where you should NEVER do this... anything safety-critical or crash-critical or anything which might come under attack. However there are cases where you can assign an acceptable real-world practical limit on N and simply allocate an abundance of memory for it.

No no, it's like when you go outside and get wet. That causes it to start raining.

That's right, we no longer tolerate them. Instead we elect them to congress, which (mostly) ensures they never accomplish anything.

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I wish everyone would quit with the alien stories already.
It's obviously ghosts.

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Sorry for the (partially) offtopic reply, but I just saw your question about Trusted Network Connect here.

I haven't been hearing much new news about Trusted Computing or Trusted Network Connect recently. Ordinarily I'd consider that a good sign that it wasn't moving forwards, however it's looking more like a successful slow-quiet-rollout strategy. Both Microsoft and Google make the Trust chip mandatory on phones, and Microsoft has declared that it's mandatory on all desktops and other devices in a few months. all new devices and computers must implement TPM 2.0 and ship with TPM support enabled , starting one year after the Win10 release. (Apparently August of this year.) The whole design of Win10 is to force rolling updates. It could get ugly if Microsoft simply pushes out all sorts of Trusted Computing crap as non-declinable "routine updates".

The phone lockdowns are definitely leading the way. Microsoft says phone manufacturers must prohibit users from turning off secureboot, and it looks like Google is also enforcing enforcing secure boot which (so far) permitting you to then drop to an eternal-nag non-Trusted mode. Sigh. Not good. I wouldn't be surprised if desktops also use a transition step of enforcing an eternal-nag-mode if you try to opt-out of Trusted Computing. At some point support can simply be ended for the nag-mode option. Then there's no opt-out at all.

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Absolutely correct. Wikipedia policy says:

Self-published sources
Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book, and also claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published media, such as books, patents, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, personal or group blogs (as distinguished from newsblogs, above), content farms, Internet forum postings, and social media postings, are largely not acceptable as sources.

and

Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it
Do not use articles from Wikipedia as sources. Also, do not use websites that mirror Wikipedia content or publications that rely on material from Wikipedia as sources. Content from a Wikipedia article is not considered reliable unless it is backed up by citing reliable sources. Confirm that these sources support the content, then use them directly.

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TigerNut, I glanced over the pages you alluded to. You had the misfortune to bump into Wikipedia's most infamous editor. He has been blocked repeatedly for his abusive treatment of other editors. The community has been reluctant to permanently block him because he produces a vast quantity of high quality work. There has been a lot of controversy about it. At what point does the harm he causes outweigh the value of his massive contributions?

You also ran into a second issue. I see you've pretty well figured it out, but I'll discuss it for public benefit. Most new editors are surprised to discover that Wikipedia does not allow articles to contain "truth". Instead, the goal of Wikipedia is to accurately summarize what reliable sources say.

If most reliable sources say the moon is made of cheese, then Wikipedia is going to accurately reflect those sources.

There's a pretty good reason for that. Editors show up at all sorts of articles wanting to write "truth". Articles about astrology, politics, evolution, ghosts, religions, global warming, everywhere. People know "the truth" and want to write it into the articles. As a matter of sanity and survival Wikipedia HAS to have a rule to shut down the kooks, believers, and activists. The rule is that Wikipedia don't deal in Truth, it deals in Reliable Sources. Editors don't judge the Truth, editors judge the Sources.

It is a messy problem when reliable sources are wrong. That's a problem Wikipedia can't fix. Editors can try to apply some common sense and hopefully find an agreeable way to deal with it. But when there's a dispute, the rule is to summarize the sources. Astrologers have to accept astrology is considered pseudoscience. Experts in recording ghost-voices have to accept that it's considered pseudoscience. Creationists and climate change deniers have to accept that evolution and global warming are considered solid mainstream accepted science. And as a side effect, you may have to accept that it's going to be difficult to fix an article if the available reliable sources screwed up.

I predict we are going to discover that people seriously suck at predicting the future.

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You're ranting and defending dumb-as-rocks idiots who think solarpanels will suck up the sun and cause cancer.... because you're pissed about heathcare.

Wingnut.

That is so nonsensical that I had to read it four times before my brain was willing to parse the intended meaning and attach it to the sentence.

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Han Unification:
Han shot at the same time.

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It's not feasible to lock my front door, because my house was built with a non-stop conveyor belt running from the mailbox to the kitchen.

The entire point of this ask-slashdot is to identify cars that DON'T integrate entertainment systems and wireless access with the safety critical electronics. Cars that DON'T do the dumb&dangerous stuff you just listed.

Data flow *from* the primary systems *to* entertainment&wireless systems is marginally acceptable, if it's a physically enforced one-way data flow using optocouplers or something.

I seriously want each car manufacture to have one employee on staff, who's sole job is say "YOU'RE FIRED" every time any idiot engineer wants to permit ANY data flow from entertainment-or-wireless systems into safety-critical systems. I don't care how limited the APIs are, I don't caret how encrypted it is, I don't care how cryptographically-secure the certificates are. If there's data flow into critical safety systems, it's effectively certain that it's going to be vulnerable. You don't connect safety-critical systems to wireless input, period.

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I haven't used it much yet, but Pale Moon may be what you're looking for. It's a fork of Firefox. The development design choices favor privacy, user-control, and improving speed&stability by dumping rarely-wanted code. Examples: They removed the Parental Controls code, they're excluding the new Firefox DRM support, they dumped support code for obsolete CPUs, they dumped some of the code for handicap-accessibility, and they currently removing phone-home code for crash reports and other potentially privacy-violating telemetry.

I haven't seen specific mention of it, but I'm certain there's no way in hell they will implement Mozilla's new policy of *prohibiting* you from loading any extension that hasn't been reviewed&approved&signed by Mozilla.

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In the next release or two, Firefox is going to start blocking you from loading any extension that hasn't been approved and signed by them. People have been SCREAMING on their message boards for a way to disable/override this, but they flat out refuse. The only way to get around it is to install a non-standard browser executable.

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In related news, MIT professor Ju Na has some exiting discoveries in Sodium technology.

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