What a load of tripe. With very little syntactic sugar you can compile C code with a C++ compiler.

You lose all the benefits of C++ by doing so, but it's perfectly feasible. So, yes, C++ is quite ready for doing low-level programming.

If you're not tracked by the NSA, you're tracked by some other nation's spy agency.

Headers are only voluntary.

So what, precisely, does this "new header" gain anyone except a circle-jerk of self-congralatory "we did something"?

Hmm. Prices have come down on the highest speed links from SaskTel. You can now get 25 megabit downloads for $80/month. http://sasktel.com/search/controller/_/Tab-4294966321/Ntk-Main_Search_Interface/Ntt-high-speed-internet-personal

Neither SaskTel nor Access Cable in Saskatchewan implement usage caps. Though Access will give you a call if you're perpetually uploading torrents at full speed, because it degrades the service for other users on your SHUB.

Here you buy capacity, not content. There are different speed tiers available for your links, and the prices go up pretty much exponentially as you get faster and faster service levels.

A 6 megabit downspeed link through SaskTel costs about $45/month, and that really does provide more capacity than I technically need for one person. 1.5 megabit runs about $20-25. But the maxed out 10 megabit runs more on the order of $80-90, if not more (I haven't checked prices in a while, there may be even faster tiers available by now.)

That's because it's flat out not true.

It's not your race that makes you a target, but the way you dress and act. I've visited no shortage of "ghetto" neighbourhoods in my life time, but I was always in a plain t-shirt and old jeans with ratty shoes, looking like I had not a dime to spare -- in other words, looking like a local.

i've also lived in a fair number of "ghetto" neighbourhoods because I didn't know better when moving to a new town, so just picked a place that was close to work. And you know what? I found the people in those poor neighbourhoods to be far more caring, far more helpful, far more generous, and generally a "better class" of people than those I've met in non-mixed neighbourhoods.

But I've also always had an ace up my sleeve. I'm Canadian, not American, so when I lived in those poor parts of the US, people soon knew "the white guy" was a Canuck and a foreigner, and thereby welcomed to the community as being another poor immigrant.

So when Ubuntu 13.10 ships, it will force you to use XMir?

If so, thanks for the warning. The last thing I want to do is deal with an unstable graphics driver. It's taken years for X11 with NVidia drivers to get stable, and I don't want to touch XMir with someone else's 10-foot pole for until it's been in use for at least 2-3 years.

That doesn't make them sinister, just patriots

And there is nothing that scares me more than a rabid patriot who will do anything "for the cause."

It's the very definition of "Fascist."

"Cry for help?"

I didn't see any "cry for help", just someone whining about the quality of the stories on slashdot.

Again.

Nobody is forcing you to read the articles. You're welcome to stick your head in the sand or cover it with a towel at any time.

You're in fantasy land.

Working for a union just means more and more onerous paperwork than any other job I've ever worked. Shuffle this, shuffle that, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

Even AT&T and Bell Canada didn't have as much paperwork as I got stuck filling out and filing while working a union job as a programmer.

Hated it, big time!

But in all practicality, how do you seize back control from the likes of the three-letter agencies?

It's not like there is any party in the US which hasn't been complicit in granting them ever-greater powers. It's not like a Canadian like myself can vote against the bullshit. It's not like Canada is about to invade the US over the issues, nor anyone else, seeing as their three-letter agencies are doing the same god-damned thing.

Just redacted enough to make them useless.

The US should stay the hell out of Syria's civil war. Both sides are vicious, dictatorship-prone fanatics. There is no "good" side to support. It's either the existing brutal dictatorship or an Al-Queda inspired bunch of Sharia nutbars.

I feel sorry for the people of Syria caught in the middle of it, but bombing the shit out of the country isn't going to make a decent democracy emerge.

You can't underestimate the power of clusters the size of the NSAs, especially the dedicated/custom hardware components.

Most of the encryption standards supported by TrueCrypt would fall to the NSAs clusters in a matter of hours or days at most. Only the "hardest" of encryptions like AES256 or RSA2048 have any hope of keeping them out. And that presumes they don't just install a backdoor on your computer to steal your keys.

Not in the heyday of "Byte" they weren't.