Your recruiter was going to tell you any kind of bullshit your recruiter feels needs to be said, in order to earn his commission. Did he offer you any kind of actual proof of that, beyond mere words?

It's good thing that you did not end up taking the offer. If you did, you left, and MS decided to go after you, even if that recruiter wouldn't be long gone by then, it would be your word versus his. And, I will bet you any amount of money, he will definitely not remember telling you anything of that sort.

Welcome to the real world!

Are there any languages which do something like this?

Yes, C++ actually. You've just described how std::string works, I believe.

There's an Akamai server on my ISP. www.foxnews.com resolves to it, traceroute reaches it two hops off the router on the other side of my DSL bridge, and the homepage loads up blazingly fast.

On the other hand, my packets to www.cnn.com wander around a series of various tubes, until they find their way to Atlanta. www.cnn.com is noticably slower to load. traceroute shows that about twice as much latency accumulates, until it stops at CNN's router.

FOX news is paying my ISP, indirectly through Akamai, for a higher tier of service for my ISP's customers. Their competition does not, and their tier of service is noticably slower.

I try my hardest, but I can't think of a damn thing that's wrong here.

Google is obviously betting that WebM in Chrome and Firefox can carry enough weight to compete against H.264 in MSIE, Opera, and Safari.

Google, obviously, has enough web-surfing based data to factor into this judgement call. Whether or not Google is right on this call, one thing is certain: Google wouldn't do this unless they were fairly confident in WebM's chances against the looming patent trolls.

This, I think, is the noteworthy aspect of this bit of news. A patent troll going after WebM will now have to expect to have to deal with Google's well-funded lawyers.

Yawn... This stuff that already been posted on the Pacman Dossier for years. Not really "news for nerds".

Now, what would really be "news for nerds" is the analysis of the ghosts' behavior in Google Pacman, which is very similar, but subtly different.

Of course, since Google Pacman's source is available, this can theoretically be deduced straight from the source, but it's more fun to figure it out by trial and error. Great timekiller. There are definitely notable differences -- like certain directions the ghosts will never turn to if they enter the intersection from one direction, but will if they enter the same intersection from the opposite direction.

The sad fact is, I'd be willing to bet some of my own money that everyone on that list makes more than you do.

You'd lose this bet. Some may do, but most of them were, apparently, some low-level flunkies in various Bumfuck, Nowhere branch offices.

Change that "everyone" to "some", or perhaps to "most", and you got yourself a winner. But you'd lose the "everyone" bet.

Initially, got a few batch of these at $work$ today -- one of the remaining 800lb Wall Street gorillas. The mails originated from some senders @NYSE, and were sent to some internal mailing lists.

It didn't take long before a bunch of our own drooling baboons clicked the link, causing more mails to go out to the internal lists. That went on for a few hours. Then came the inevitable "why are you sending this", "i must've gotten this by mistake", "take me off the list" replies from more internal senders, resent to the same internal lists. Then came the inevitable "this is a virus, do not reply to all" replies to all.

I told my management that what they have in their inbox, basically, is a list of people to get the axe when the next round of layoffs comes around. Can't create a more accurate list of people who are truly the bottom of the barrel, and do not belong in an organization that's supposedly charged with with billions of investors' and depositors' money.

P.S. -- I also thought that this was the exploit for the 0-day PDF flaw too, given the .pdf extension. But if this was just an ordinary executable, that you actually had to click through an extra time to execute, then there's even less excuse for anyone with a brain to get infected with this.

What's really needed is some sort of organized access to downloadable broadcast content. I rarely watch live TV. I really don't care when the shows are on.

Right now, if you want a particular show, you have to figure out where to download, if it's even available for downloading. But usually, all you get is a postage-sized streaming window.

Many new TV sets coming out today can grab video contents from a small collection of online content. This needs to be scaled up, so that people can simply ditch the old-style cable and satellite monopolies. I want to turn on my TV, and select from a choice of live streams, from the news channels, or available list of archived shows.

Oh, and since most folks have multiple sets, it would be nice to have a standard by which your server in the basement can retrieve the shows on your behalf, and your TV sets fetch the video from it, instead of having all your TV sets waste bandwidth downloading the same show.

This is a question that should really be asked of Microsoft

Microsoft, are you really pleased with yourself, for leveraging your monopoly power to foist upon the public a rube-goldbergian monster of an operating system. An overengineered contraption that is completely beyond all hope. Tavis Ormandy did not create the whopper of a hole. You did. It's your bug, not his.

He gave Microsoft five days to fix the bug. I think that's plenty. We are not talking about some rinky-dinky Open Sauce project, run by volunteers in their spare time. We're talking about one of the world's largest corporations, with an army of (presumably) expert software developers in their employ, pretty much in all timezones in the world. Before you bitch and moan about not having enough time, why don't you explain exactly what you did after receiving his bug report?

If you did not immediately assign sufficient resources to isolate and identify the underlying bug, and did not assign developers to work 24 a day (in shifts, of course, around the world, in according with their timezones' ordinary business hours), then why not?

Shit. Piss. Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.

C'mon. I'm waiting for you.

Gee, what do these have in common: "Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008".

That's right, managed code. Or a comparable facsimile thereof.

That's right, boys and girls. Forget about wasting time learning such useless concepts as proper memory management, or such useless fundamental concepts as the heap, the stack, etc... Just slap together a bunch of code, and it'll run just fine. No sweat. Dumb things down, so that everyone can now be a soooper hacker!

If I was living in UK right now, I'll be celebrating right now. It's clear as day this will result in the schools will now start churning out masses of wide-eyed ignoramuses who will go forth and start churning out volumes of code which they won't really understand themselves. Perpetual job security for me, AFAIK.