What bugs the shit out of me is that people who should know better act as though DRM isn't impossible. Quick, describe a system to me in which I can give you my data but you can only process it in ways I approve of. That means that you can't copy-and-paste it, or even just take a film photo of the screen and scan that in. Seriously. Working copy protection cannot be implemented in this universe, perhaps short of every participating computer having a quantum component that stops working as soon as you observe it.

No, I wouldn't secure my personal data with Digital Restrictions Management. That's insane and can't possibly work. I'd secure my personal data with contracts that say "this is what you can do with it, and I'm going to sue you into oblivion if I find it on the Internet". That's the only known way of restricting how another party uses your information.

...any game with a low quality graphics setting at a low resolution

> But we already HAD a word for that and it was not "hackers" it was con artists..

I think the distinction is in your last three words, "hacking a system".

A con man or fraudster will get a _person_ to hand over their property.
A hacker manipulates a _system_ to have it do something other than what it's supposed to do.
TFA says:

"The group was able to change the DNS records managed by Network Solutions for a number of security companies".

They did a number of companies by exploiting NetSol's SYSTEM, not simply tricking one person, but exploiting
holes in the system that the person what was part of. If you can fairly reliably exploit the system, it's a hack in my opinion whether that's a TCP/IP system, a phone system, a traffic light control system, or system that includes both
computers and human.

However, see also the Jargon File for original meanings of the term:
http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_23.html#SEC30

You work for the US congress, don't you.

Well, except for a few Linux distros, OS X, and any other version of Windows ever. Excluding those, it's not terrible.

It's different with family. Facebook et al lets you avoid real social interaction with family members. There's certainly a measurable difference in this "online" vs "real" social interaction, measured in stabbings and shootings. There's a reason why the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are the busiest times of the year for emergency rooms.

So, yes, I'd certainly say "less real", but that's not in any way the opposite of "better". For example, it's unlikely that any interaction between your online friends and your girlfriend will end with someone in the emergency room and someone in jail. Less real, but better.

It has to do with the transition of the 50's, 60's, and 70's when the two parties re-oriented to split the public along the social axis instead of the fiscal axis. Remember that the Democrats were brought kicking and screaming into implementing things like desegregation, and realizing their growing horrible public image began pushing out social conservatives from their party.

With the help of the media things like the abortion debate were re-framed as a "pro-choice" movement, dehumanizing the fetus much the same as the Democrats once dehumanized people with different colored skin.

Its the same tactics as always from the Democrat camp, just with a better paint job. They say one thing, but do the other and through public relations spin look good because the average American is shallow and not at all thoughtful about what their position really is, and what the actions of government really are.

Its the party of popular opinion, which would be OK if not for their influence and control over which opinions are popular to begin with. This is due in a large part to the transition from investigative journalism to he-said-she-said journalism, and to make sure that it stays that way the press itself is now a target of an administration willing to pass laws that give it the power to determine by themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and willing to use the justice department to intimidate the media.

Hmm... troll, or idiot... I can't decide. Ah well, it's a distinction without a difference.

Rule 1: don't be a jerk when you might be wrong.
Rule 2: you can always be wrong.
Rule 3: raymorris is never wrong (note rule 2 says YOU can be wrong, not me).

Hmm, come to think of it, I WAS wrong when I said Clinton didn't barricade open air monuments.
My point, that such shenanigans are a new form of BS by democrats, was correct, though. Perhaps we need rule #4:

Rule 4: If it appears that raymorris is wrong, look at the bigger picture. He's always right about the big picture.

Works great when it doesn't annoy any hardware geeks. :)

When I worked in a hardware lab, I remember the time facilities put lock-boxes around the thermostats. Hilarity ensued. Eventually, there would be no physical evidence of how the thermostats would mysteriously change settings inside their lockboxes.

Bullshit. People will always take short cuts, even in the military. But if your company exists to create software, the guys who create software are ultimately the real assets.

Good security revolves around understanding that people take shortcuts. Make the right thing to do easier than the wrong thing. For example, any security door between where people sit and the smoking area will be propped open - guaranteed. You can try to resolve that with shouting, or you can simply build a smoking area inside the secure perimeter. With the latter approach it's now easier to smoke in the smoking area than not, and no one will be working around your security for their convenience (and to avoid tracking).

Each phone already has a unique IMEI or IMSI to distinguish it from other phones, so no it's not very new.

What makes this different is it means an app could uniquely identify your phone even if you blocked it from accessing your IMEI or refused to install apps which access the IMEI, in a bid to stay anonymous.

Actually, Apple's share of the tablet market has dropped to 32% this year, with Android now commanding 63%. Almost an exact reversal of 2012. These are sales of new units though, so Apple may still have >50% of the tablets which are currently in use. But the trend is pretty clear. (I'd mention the stats on tablet browser usage, except Apple tends to use unique visitors per month which distorts actual use statistics. On phones, Apple leads 2:1 in unique visitors per month, but Android leads 2:1 in page hits, indicating lots of iPhone users use the web but not very much, while fewer Android users use the web but they use it a lot. I'm still trying to find data on what the situation is exactly with tablets.)

Actually, for a brand new project with people who have never used C it might not be so bad. People who "only know Java" would find good modern C++ style far more natural than all the bad ways. The problem is people who are C experts who are using a bit of C++ here and a bit there, with coding standards that make good sense in C and are just terrible in C++ - like the Google coding standards (I hear there's significant unrest about this inside Google now, so who knows, they may pave the way to a whole new pool of engineers who know how to do C++ right, but right now it stinks).

Ahh "I don't understand the ned for it, so there is no need for it and you're just wrong". Are you perhaps a manager?

The need arises for complex embedded programming: appliances, storage networking boxes, some normal networking boxes (though much of that work actually uses functional languages), and so on. When you're coding for multi-year uptimes and need to be utterly, absolutely sure beyond any doubt that not only do you have no resource leaks, but that you have no "dangling pointers". Slab allocation makes dangling pointers the chief cause of corruption, and a much bigger security problem than in normal code, because a pointer to a object that has been freed will almost certainly become a pointer to a valid object of the same type soon enough.

Marking the object as "freed" does you no good, because that object will be re-used by the next alloc and marked "good" again.

Java is unsuitable for this sort of coding, unless perhaps you hack around to make slab allocation work in some way (which would bring these problems along), because it's quite important that the space reserved for each specific type of object be known and fixed in advanced.