that is simply caused by associative and automatic conversion -- i'm sure you could configure the compiler to throw a warning in this situation.

this needs three functions, one of which is implicitly called (actually builtin in this case, but you could easily be adding shapes and strings, it would make as much sense)
int plus (int, int)
string plus (string string)
string int2string(int)

3=plus(1,2)
"3 is not " = plus(int2string(3)," is not ")
"3 is not 1" = plus("3 is not ",int2string(1))
"3 is not 12"= ...

(unless it evaluates the other way, to 12 is not 3, its been a while since i've done any real programming, and things like this only come up once in a blue moon.)

yes, the similarity is immediately obvious

--BF code for hello world removed because i was unable to get it past the junk filter. (http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm)

# Hello world in perl
print "Hello World!\n";

besides, you don't have to provide source with the binary, you have to provide the source if asked for it/have the source available -- and the reply would be "sure, go to ubuntu.com and click there and here to download it"

if you haven't changed it, then linking the person to provider of the original source would be fine.

"The purported reason for a customs official to search your physical luggage is to check that you are not trying to bring into the country physical goods which are banned/restricted/subject to tariffs."

And there can be electronic material which falls into that category, so if a search of a physical locked container for that purpose is fine, then I don't see the search of an electronic locked container as a larger privacy invasion. IE, someone looking through your internet history vs someone looking through the underwear you have in your suitcase.

The "none of which applies" is currently false, as some electronic material is banned. The "should apply" is a different discussion, but one which should be undertaken. I think that an examination of the computer contents is fine, duplication is not. (consider how a suitcase with paper based financial records would be handled, electronic records should be given no different handling.)

then you have to retype a whole lot of data / contact the bank to get an up-to-date financial records, and hope that you don't get audited by the IRS for the next 5 years, unless you have paper backups of the financial data.

Oh, and you have to remind your "friends" to please not do that again.

each is individually less than 15% as powerful as a cpu anyway, if you loose 3/4 of your efficiency with bad code, you'll still end up with more than 4 cpu cores worth of compute power.
the "same thing" basically means that if you have a branch in your code and some threads go one way, and some go the other way then those two are run sequentially.
the total time to run
code:
A
if B then X else Y
C

is a+b+x+y+c if all the threads don't take the same branch.

just for interest, which voice did everyone hear "we require more vespene gas" in? -- for me it was zerg ...
(and don't say you didn't hear it, or you have no business posting on /. , especially in a SC thread ....)

The biggest problem with the old style menus was the number of "features" they try to represent. each menu was becoming too long, with many submenus. I believe that microsofts testing shows the average number of clicks to get to any specific item drastically decreases using the ribbons. (although a minimum of 2 clicks to do anything is quite annoying - select which ribbon, click the thingy. Apart from a few esoteric examples above (which don't quite have any good place to go under the new scheme, although i suspect there are better ways to get at whatever is wanted under document properties) everythign is in a good place under the catagories listed, with the most commonly used items big and in the top left corner. (and no, they don't randomly shuffle themselves around in my experience).

RE: "These experts seem to believe users actually READ all the options" -- for commonly used options they don't, but for the one time a year you want to remove duplicates from an excel sheet (actually found in a logical place under data tab, data tools group) people do read through options until they find what they want. The new ribbon layout makes that operation (find the random button you know is there somewhere) faster, at a slight cost to power users who don't know keyboard shortcuts, who take a single extra click to get to where they want, if the operation they are doing is of a different type to the previous one (want to conditionally format that new column, then click home, click conditional formatting, click data bars, click the blue bars).

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx gives a good overview of why microsoft went the way they did.

i believe it detected spectral anomalies which are a necessary but not sufficient condition for chlorophyll based vegetation.
ie, it is a definite detection of something matches what vegetation is expected to be like, but without more detailed info other sources of this anomaly cannot be conclusively ruled out. (unlike the spectral signature of methane, which is a much more binary choice once the SRN on your spectrometer is good enough - if you detect the absorption lines, methane is there in significant amounts, if you don't it isn't.)

the problem is enough of the 10% marginal swing voters aren't in favour that no polly will propose such a thing if (s)he is interested in a career after the next election.

how else would we not know the election had happened?

Other than actual kernel updates you do not need to reboot linux after updates.
Naturally any single program which is updated needs to be restarted for the updates to take effect, but this means that the entire computer doesn't need to be rebooted. Even kernel level drivers can be updated without a reboot - probably the the closest you get is when you have to update your GUI (either KDE or Gnome) or Nvidia drivers, but even that is a "drop back to the command prompt, issue 1 command, start gui again" procedure, not a full restart (only takes 10 seconds).
Most people don't have a separate SMS or SCCM server knocking around (medium sized business and above could, but thats not "most" people)

He does have a basis -- the effort (time or cost) required to get the system to a state where compromise was not likely.

simplified a bit :
Linux - don't run as root, install updates regularly, think twice before entering root password.
Windows - attempt to have the logged in user not running as admin, install updates regularly, install run update and monitor virus scanner + firewall software. think twice before entering admin password (if running as non-admin)

OSX - never had admin on OSX, from what i understand its the same as linux with respect to security.

the effort to run (pre vista) windows as non-admin is substantially harder than non-admin linux.
installing updates is approximately the same effort.
windows (currently) requires extra software installed to be secure.

Objectively windows is harder to secure (harder on 2 out of 3). (this also assumes that this is the minimum effort required to secure each system to the same level - on any system you could spend much more effort due to a lack of knowledge, or wrong pre-conceived ideas concerning security)

"So bank robbers and pickpockets are just capitalists, then?"
Bank robbers are just people who consider the return on investment, or risk vs reward (whichever way they do it) of bank vault monies vs jail time to fall on the side of the bank vault. Most people disagree, and consider the damage to society that the theft would represent to be more than the financial gain of that individual and so a social system of punitive damages (called "the law") was organised along with enforcement measures (police).

Anything can be though of in terms of return on investment. Thats the entire point of having these punitive damages (admittedly, charging someone their entire lifes earnings should discourage people, but that doesn't appear to be working) -- to make the return on stealing a $1 cd to be negative.

anand's review -- http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 -- shows that random write performance on a good ssd is still 20x better than the best hdd.

That review also covers the cause of the performance drop as the drive ages that most review don't originally consider. The review covers random reads and writes in a variety of patterns.