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Comment Re:It's getting hot, hot, hot! (Score 1) 52

It was similar on Saturday. Heaps of stories about how parts of Sydney might reach _38_, and meanwhile Canberra quietly breaks 40.

But of course, it's forbidden to ever mention that Canberra is consistently hotter than Sydney in summer, otherwise people might forget the unassailable truth that Canberra is always freezing cold.

Comment Re:I love netbooks (Score 1) 336

The EeePC901 was the best netbook ever made.
Not only did the later ones miss the point by going to 10" and putting in a spinning disk, but they also reduced the quality of other components like the webcam.

Unfortunately my 901 died, I'm hoping to find another, but it seems that no one that has one wants to sell....

For a replacement, I considered a tablet - in particular an ASUS Transformer, but Android wasn't going to suit my needs (Proper multitasking where the application doesn't randomly close when the OS decides it needs to, and support for all the keyboard modifier keys - ctrl, alt, etc), and it looked like the Linux ports to it were too hit-and-miss to guarantee success.
I then considered an Ultrabook - either an 11" zenbook, or a Macbook air, but apart from the significantly higher cost, 11" is just way too big. An 11" laptop you can carry most places, a 9" one you can carry _everywhere_.

Comment Re:The third option (Score 1) 536

No checked exceptions put a massive burden on the user of your code.

Checked exceptions should only be used when
1. The exception is likely to happen in normal use of the method.
2. The calling code can do something sensible to deal with it.

If it's not likely to happen, then there's no point enforcing immediate handling of it. A generic top level exception handling routine will do.
Likewise, if the immediate calling code can't do anything about it, then it's just going to have to pass it out a level anyway, and at that point your Exception is polluting someone else's API, resulting in tight coupling. Either that, or they wrap the exception anyway - probably in an unchecked one, effectively making your checked exception pointless.

Comment Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score 1) 990

Now, if half the population starts using "equipt" to mean "equipped", then it will be added to the dictionary.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/equipt
See also:
Burnt,
Learnt,
Earnt,
Slept,
Spelt
Smelt,
Dreamt.

Equipt probably isn't exactly standard these days (I use all those other -t words, but would still use equipped), but it's hardly "newspeak ebonification".

Comment Re:People think google are different. (Score 1) 408

That is not Facebook deliberately selling personal information to advertisers.
That was a security flaw in their application API that may have, in the case where application developers did something wrong, resulted in an access key being logged in an advertiser's logs. It is also not Facebook passing that information on to its advertisers, it's the application developer passing it on to _their_ advertisers. It was a limited life access key which only provided access to the information that the user had authorised the application to have access to.

If you didn't use applications, then you had zero chance of that happening to you, and if you did use applications, it's still not a guarantee that it happened. (Though to be safe you have to assume it did).
Using an application is always a risk, and when you grant access to parts of your profile to an application, you are placing your trust in them to not do such things. Some of the most successful application developers proudly admit to being scam artists (Zynga for example), so trusting an application is inherently a silly thing to do.

So in short, that link does not in any way refute my statement. Facebook does not sell your personal information.
Once Google has apps for Google+ (which they will, eventually), the same potential issues will happen there.

Comment Re:People think google are different. (Score 1) 408

One major difference between Google and facebook is that Google sells your eyeballs to advertisers, facebook sells your information

Show me evidence that Facebook sells your information.

Facebook sells eyeballs just like Google does. Facebook does not give advertisers your information.

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