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Reminds me of of a blog-post I stumbled across a while ago: Heat Death Of Programming Languages

Other than a select few (C and Scheme spring to mind), programming languages get more and more bloated and incoherent over time. We certainly see this in C++, which is probably the 'best' example of the ugliness that arises through backward-compatibility. There are 4 different languages in C++ now: C++ proper, the preprocessor, the template system, and the compile-time-friendly subset.

I suspect the D language may be growing too big for its own good. They're much less concerned with backward-compatibility, which I suspect helps with the ugliness problem, but doesn't help with, say, high-barrier-of-entry-to-reimplement, or high barrier until you're able to read real-world D code.

This just in:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.u...

If you don't get xkcd, there's xkcdexplained, or xkcdsucks, or xkcd-sucks, or xkcdisntfunny.

There are two questions whose both correct answers correlate pretty highly with whether I'm going to get along with someone casually:

• Do you like cats? Answers "yes";
• Do you like xkcd? Answers "no".

The Raspberry Pi Model B+ has several real improvements, but it is *not* compatible with all previous hardware add-ons because of the new board layout. More details here: http://romillys-robots.blogspo...

This isn't Wikipedia but http://intelligenceref.blogspo... If mentioned kim philby would you want documentary evidence for that as well - the KGB's romeo spies are very well-known what do you think ana chapman was doing when she married tim "nice but dim" to get an English passport

Here'a an article critical of wind which reflects some of the criticisms I have heard. I have to wonder if people's support for wind power is just wishful thinking on a mass scale. People don't want their bubbles burst.

If you are looking for some support for wind power this is definitely NOT the place to be.

Here'a an article critical of wind which reflects some of the criticisms I have heard. I have to wonder if people's support for wind power is just wishful thinking on a mass scale. People don't want their bubbles burst.

If you are looking for some support for wind power this is definitely NOT the place to be.

Whether you consider this issue is hype depends on your answer to "if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to observe it..." thought experiment.

The author of LZ4 has a summary with regards to LZ4 (both LZO and LZ4 are based on the LZ77 compression and both contained the same flaw) - that the issue has not been demonstrated as being exploitable in currently deployed programs due to their configuration (a rather angrier redacted original reply was originally posted). So at present this issue is severe but of low importance. If a way is found to exploit this problem on currently deployed popular programs without changing their configuration then this issue will also be of high importance but since this issue has now been patched hopefully newly deployed systems wouldn't be vulnerable.

Whether you consider this issue is hype depends on your answer to "if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to observe it..." thought experiment.

The author of LZ4 has a summary with regards to LZ4 (both LZO and LZ4 are based on the LZ77 compression and both contained the same flaw) - that the issue has not been demonstrated as being exploitable in currently deployed programs due to their configuration (a rather angrier redacted original reply was originally posted). So at present this issue is severe but of low importance. If a way is found to exploit this problem on currently deployed popular programs without changing their configuration then this issue will also be of high importance but since this issue has now been patched hopefully newly deployed systems wouldn't be vulnerable.

BICEP2 were a bunch of young upstarts

You got that right. And the tender egos of the Planck team got hurt by the "young upstarts" outdoing them. Awww, how sad.

Fact is, the BICEP2 team got the result and published in a leading journal. The team hardly backtracked at all. For more on this, see the blog post by Lubos Motl: "BICEP2 gets published in PRL".

It is pathetic how established scientists try to protect their egos from "young upstarts".

The potential answers to your question are "yes" "of course" and "how stupid are you to even have to ask?"

There was no call for such a nasty response. I provided a nice post that I thought you might find useful, and you belittled my points like some arrogant prick. Does that brighten your day? Unfortunately, the future might just make a fool of you.

One would have to be pretty stupid to miss that ARM and x86 markets are converging. Servers are going ARM. x86 is going mobile.

One would have to be pretty stupid not to see that ISA does not dictate audience or sales strategies. Any current association is correlation, not causation. The montetization strategy is driven by the the target market. If ARM and x86 are converging to compete in the same markets ... well, I'll let your figure it out from there. Let me know if you need help.

One would have to be pretty stupid not to see that Porting to ARM, while sometimes tedious, is not nearly as arduous as one might think:

• * Portal, Half-life 2, Brochard, and many other desktop-quality games are already on ARM.
• * NVidia and Valve have ported Source to ARM. URE, Unity, and Uningine are already there, as is SDL.
• * I have compiled numerous "x86" games to my Jetson TK1 (like Xonotic) with little trouble and performance is better than the AMD AM1 chips, including the 5350. The only major problem I've seen so far is hand-coded optimizations like SSE.

One would have to be pretty stupid not to see that porting to Nvidia ARM with great hardware and excellent drivers might be less trouble than trying to get shitty AMD drivers to work with SteamOS. I wouldn't be surprised if folks over at Valve had the same thought, judging by their impression of AMD's drivers. (hint: they are Vendor "B"). Adding weight to this, I have it on good source that a "consumer" variant of the Jetson TK1 board should come to market "soon". Sounds awfully steambox-ish.

Let's not be stupid, ok? You might want to drop $192 and get up to speed on ARM yourself.

Meanwhile, in Git's crypto code.

(Linked from this blog entry.)

Since you insist on nitpicking, let's set the record straight.

YOU linked to THIS PAGE.

THAT page referenced THIS PAGE.

In one of my replies, I quoted from the latter page's quote of the comments by the publishing house's Director.

You then suggested that we look at the actual review, when what I had quoted was from that page at ippublishing which does in fact contain quotes from the review itself, plus comments by the Director about the review.

And all of them supported the point I was making. While you, in turn, insisted in picking at irrelevant details about what I'd written, rather than addressing the actual points I made.

Is that accurate enough for you? Or do you want to nitpick/troll further?

As with most things, there always seems to be hidden agendas.

Why Brendan Eich had to Go

"Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side.

One cannot and should not simply interpret the IPCCs ranges for AR4 or 5 as confidence intervals or pdfs and hence they are not directly comparable to observation based intervals (as e.g. in Otto et al).

In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.

A careful, constructive, and comprehensive analysis of what these ranges mean, and how they come to be different, and what underlying problems these comparisons bring would indeed be a valuable contribution to the debate.

I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place.

And I can't see an honest attempt of constructive explanation in the manuscript.

Thus I would strongly advise rejecting the manuscript in its current form." - http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2...

There's a comment at the bottom of the article by David Poole that links to a post talking about OpenGL driver quality on desktop Linux and mobile Linux. The summary from that blog post is:

• Vendor N closed source desktop Windows/Linux - Excellent. Near perfect.
• Vendor X open source desktop Linux - Good. Highly responsive to bug reports but updates get to users slowly.
• Vendor I closed source desktop Windows - Good but lacking useful features.
• Vendor A1 closed source desktop Windows/Linux - Mediocre. Unresponsive to bug reports.
• Vendor A2 closed source mobile - Bad. Buggy, vendor knows there are issues but doesn't fix them, driver limits performance forcing others to implement workarounds.
• Vendor Q closed source mobile - Bad. Buggy, vendor is unresponsive to bug reports.
• Vendor P closed source mobile - Unknown. Driver does not publicly support high enough version of OpenGL ES.

Yes, I can see that sort of code would benefit a lot. Not an area I've done much work in, but I guess a lot of people are. I'm actually really interested in code that performs well - I spend quite a lot of time profiling and tuning. Some of the things Martin Thomson has done in Java land are pretty cool. Check out http://lmax-exchange.github.io... and http://mechanical-sympathy.blo...

So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?

Agree. This is the slippery slope that leads to barbaric systems like Sharia, with stoning for adultery, death for professing belief in other religions, and so on.

Or beating people up because they are different Five Hasidic Jews Arrested for Williamsburg Attack on Gay Man

Or because they don't follow your rules Ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple sparks riot after telling woman to move to the back of a public bus

If they had laws saying that people had to stay at the back of the bus or that they had to be beaten up then you'd have a point

So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?

Agree. This is the slippery slope that leads to barbaric systems like Sharia, with stoning for adultery, death for professing belief in other religions, and so on.

The link to the text "virulently opposed to Proposition 8" has nothing do with backing the claim that behaved "virulently". Weasel words: score -1 for the summary.

Ok you clicked the link and read it. But let's consider the blog post a bit closer:

we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues

.....

We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8

So ... it's a bit like your grandpa who never talks about the war. And then during a big family meal, people are talking about abortion and assisted suicide. He gets up and starts out with "I never talk about the war" but then launches into a tirade about hitlers death camps (just saving time for us both here), describes them first-hand, and then posits his opinion that they were the logical conclusion of eugenics in general.

That's pretty dramatic. Sorry, I couldn't think of a car analogy. But from what I can see, google is swinging a huge amount of weight and being very strongly opinionated about a highly nuanced subject. At least companies like Redhat and Mozilla have enough sense to keep out of such discussions! They and their ilk are the only ones that get my money.

Compare that to User Friendly. Aside from its "moderately-promising 14-year-old still showing too much influence from the Teach-Yourself-Cartooning book" drawing style, User Friendly has always relied on its geek-friendly subject matter and viewpoints to flatter the audience and obscure the fact that it's neither creative nor funny.

Here's a good example:-
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...

There's nothing creative about this. The "news" was a real-life item reported in many tech outlets about a year back. The strip itself is just a lazy excuse to let the audience laugh again at that story- it adds nothing to it except an audience-pandering but uncreative aside.

xkcd has a long way to go before it gets *that* lazy.

(*) XKCD isn't exactly detailed in the artwork stakes either, but that comes across as an intentional style, whereas User Friendly just looks like a wannabe of better-looking cartoons.
(**) This is before it was (allegedly) cool to be a geek.

"There is not a scap of evidence for what you claim in your post, unless of course you belive in the fanciful IRIS theory."

Well, there's rather more than a shred. In fact prior to the greenhouse gas bandwagon, it was generally recognized that clouds make the earth cooler.

Since I'm posting here on Slashdot, I'd also like to mention that unfortunately for the theory OP mentions, Arctic sea ice is at perfectly normal levels right now and Antarctic sea ice is at a new record for this time of year.

This comes from his belief that proprietary closed source software is dangerous and should be fought. So he is just being consistent. You may disagree with his assumption (I disagree at least with part of his ideas as well), but you can't say that his posture is inconsistent with his beliefs.

The problem with his belief system is a failure to make a distinction between the big software houses and the small, independent outfits. He lumps them together under the evil banner.

The GPL as it stands is actually helping the big guys beat out the small guys. How can a new entrant hope to build a compiler stack that can take on IBM, Microsoft et al, who have a vast base of legacy code to draw from? He can't. He can't build it off GCC, or he loses control. But someone can now build an innovative tool to replace one bit of the LLVM stack, sell it at a reasonable price (and not coupled to a particular IDE) and make a good living.

Isn't it better to support a diverse market of little guys than have three or four mega-vendors?

(And if it's OK, I'd like to plug my own blog post on the topic. If it's not OK, feel free to mod me down as spam...)

Obligatory reply

I'd love to learn from you how to tell if someone's analysis is deep or superficial by reading "quotes". It would save me a lot of time.

Note the word "totalitarian" appeared in the twentieth century, and means a society where the government controls all aspects of life; modern democracies are far more totalitarian than medieval monarchies were. The Sun King controlled far less of his subjects' lives than the Committee of Public Safety did, or 2013 HMG does.

There are a handful - maybe 12? democracies on the world that work fairly well: basically Britain and her white former colonies, and a few post-WWII installations in western Europe. They are not "just weird" - they are characterised by a very strong elite class with a historical "right to rule" that is largely recognised by the populace, and civil-service institutions that exert very powerful restraint on politicians. (Amusingly, these saving virtues of the system are commonly seen as problems). Neoreactionaries worry that this is not stable, that particularly since the 20th-century introduction of universal suffrage those stabilising influences are being eroded. Again, what you miss by picking out a few quotes is the depth of analysis behind the quotes. If you check, for instance, this 2007 post of mine, you see the beginnings of an inquiry into the problem (taken, you will observe, from a more pro-democracy point of view than I hold now), developed further by 2009 into this.

The causation between democracy and economic growth is obviously the other way round: poor people follow a leader who will protect them, a large middle class starts to demand the political power that other rich countries teach is its right.

I wouldn't expect you to pick all this up in a few hours — if I can make one suggestion that will help you going forward, it is to stop thinking of systems as "democratic" or "non-democractic". It sounds like a classification of animals into "ducks" and "non-ducks", and treating snakes and giraffes as examples of the "non-duck" category (Charles II's England and Mussolini's Italy are about as similar). Instead, look at the effects of the systems — who actually has the power, into what areas of life does that extend. I guarantee you will find that interesting, though not that you will necessarily agree with me at the end of it.

I'd love to learn from you how to tell if someone's analysis is deep or superficial by reading "quotes". It would save me a lot of time.

Note the word "totalitarian" appeared in the twentieth century, and means a society where the government controls all aspects of life; modern democracies are far more totalitarian than medieval monarchies were. The Sun King controlled far less of his subjects' lives than the Committee of Public Safety did, or 2013 HMG does.

There are a handful - maybe 12? democracies on the world that work fairly well: basically Britain and her white former colonies, and a few post-WWII installations in western Europe. They are not "just weird" - they are characterised by a very strong elite class with a historical "right to rule" that is largely recognised by the populace, and civil-service institutions that exert very powerful restraint on politicians. (Amusingly, these saving virtues of the system are commonly seen as problems). Neoreactionaries worry that this is not stable, that particularly since the 20th-century introduction of universal suffrage those stabilising influences are being eroded. Again, what you miss by picking out a few quotes is the depth of analysis behind the quotes. If you check, for instance, this 2007 post of mine, you see the beginnings of an inquiry into the problem (taken, you will observe, from a more pro-democracy point of view than I hold now), developed further by 2009 into this.

The causation between democracy and economic growth is obviously the other way round: poor people follow a leader who will protect them, a large middle class starts to demand the political power that other rich countries teach is its right.

I wouldn't expect you to pick all this up in a few hours — if I can make one suggestion that will help you going forward, it is to stop thinking of systems as "democratic" or "non-democractic". It sounds like a classification of animals into "ducks" and "non-ducks", and treating snakes and giraffes as examples of the "non-duck" category (Charles II's England and Mussolini's Italy are about as similar). Instead, look at the effects of the systems — who actually has the power, into what areas of life does that extend. I guarantee you will find that interesting, though not that you will necessarily agree with me at the end of it.

It's been around a lot longer than 25 years. Mutagenesis via irradiation's been with us since the 50s. For a rather silly example, have a read of this look at amateur grower involvement as well as the wikipedia article on atomic gardens. So yeah: very extremely not a new thing.

There's actually a real cockup on Android where it's really difficult for an app to identify a device, but in an anonymous manner i.e. tie an app to a device, but without needing info about the user.

The android guys give some hand-wavey stuff here:

http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/identifying-app-installations.html

But the conclusion they come to is hot air:

"the best approach is probably the use of ANDROID_ID on anything reasonably modern, with some fallback heuristics for legacy devices."

What would be best would be if Android could give a reliable device Id which didn't require access to "Phone State and Identity" or "Contacts" or some other coarse-grained permissioon and just allowed an app to get a random number which identifies a handset, but not the user.

You mean: "I refer you to the reply given in Arkell and Pressdram".

• http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/muslim_rape_wave_in_sweden/
• http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/swedish-city-overrun-by-muslim-crime-turns-to-superhero/
• http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/muslims-burn-down-church-in-storholmsjo-in-karlskrona-sweden
• http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/sweden-muslims-admit-deliberate-hate-crimes-against-swedes-government-is-proposed-to-reward-them-with-jobs/
• http://www.barenakedislam.com/2012/09/08/open-letter-from-a-swedish-woman-about-the-scourge-of-muslim-immigration-and-multiculturalism/
• http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/hate-crimes-against-jews-in-muslim.html

This is no indication of that. One of the biggest problems web developers face is people using old browsers that aren't as technically capable. It increase the effort required to implement and maintain features, particularly for large, complex web applications.

Google have a long-standing policy to support the most recent major version of browsers and the previous major version. What prompted the dropping of support for Internet Explorer 9 was the release of Internet Explorer 11 a couple of weeks ago.

They described this policy - which applies to all browsers, not just Internet Explorer - a couple of years ago. When they did so, they explicitly provided links to download the latest versions of major browsers, including Internet Explorer.

This is not a conspiracy to punish Internet Explorer users. This is an effort to reduce unnecessary work for their engineering teams.

This blog post by the same author as what I linked to above discusses LUX directly. It seems like theories will have to be pretty contrived to reconciliate the different experiments. So I guess the detections were just systematic errors after all.

Several different experiments have tried to measure dark matter directly in the lab, and the experimental situation is pretty confusing. This plot shows the confidence intervals and exclusion limits for various experiments (but it does not include LUX yet). The shaded regions are confidence intervals, that basically say "we've seen dark matter, and its properties lie somewhere in this region. But the dotted lines say "we haven't seen it, and if it exists, it can't lie above these lines".

What is strange, then, is that all of the detections are in regions that have been excluded by other experiements. LUX just makes the situation even more strained by pulling those upper bounds even lower. Still, those bounds and intervals depend on assumptions about the properties of dark matter, and it may be possible to reconcile the results.

It will be interesting to see what happens to those tentative detections when they get more data. My bet is that in the end some systematic effect will be found to be responsible for the apparent signal. Or (much less likely) that they were just flukes. But who knows?

http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/

This is just hilarious. Willard Foxton survival blog in the world of online dating. I guess it explains the tone of his article in Telegraph. I only wonder why they (Telegraph, that is) allow to print his utter nonsense.

Let’s say you’re watching a video from Justin Timberlake. What type of video comment would be awesome to see: one from JT himself, one from people you care about who love the video ...or one from just the last random person to stop by?

Note the emphasis; "people you care about" (e.g. fellow groupthinking fans defending Lady Gaga to the death against those who say her latest weird-ass dressing up video for an otherwise relatively normal pop song isn't the best thing since sliced bread) and "who love the video" (i.e. pro positive comments). Very adolescent.

Frankly, if I stop by to see the video and I decide to say something negative about it for an entirely legitimate reason, I consider it mod abuse if it's clearly downvoted purely because it's not the majority and/or fan opinion. (And one must remember that rabid fans in small groups can push above their weight if they're aggressive in pushing their views against a less obsessed majority who disagree- or at least don't agree- with them; this doesn't make it legitimate however.)

But it appears that YouTube are now encouraging this behaviour.

We know this already happens (and that YouTube comments frequently descend into moronic flamewarring) but it's disappointing to see that YouTube (i.e. Google) are officially condoning it. This is likely to encourage the spread of this attitude even to videos on less fan-oriented but still divisive topics (e.g. controversial science and politics). It's also likely to legitimise such mod abuse elsewhere as people now think that's what they're for... if they didn't already.

I can't wait.

"They also claim to have found a "master amplituhedron" with infinitely many faces in infinitely many dimensions which should now be as important as the circle in two dimensions. ;-) Its volume counts the "total amplitude" (?) of all processes; faces of this master jewel harbor the amplitudes for processes with finite collections of particles."

http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/amplituhedron-wonderful-pr-on-new.html

No idea what that means, but doesn't it sound cool?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/17/ridleys-riposte-to-john-abraham/

Guest essay by Dr. Matt Ridley

On a blog called Desmog Blog, John Abraham has criticized my recent article in the Wall Street Journal on climate sensitivity. Here’s my piece http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464.html
And here’s his piece: http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/16/john-abraham-slams-matt-ridley-climate-denial-op-ed-wall-street-journal.

It’s a poor response, characterized by inaccurate representation of what I said, even down to actual misquoting. In the whole article, he puts just four words in quotation marks as written by me, yet in doing so he misses out a whole word: 20% of the quotation. Remarkable. If I did that, I would be very embarrassed.

He directly contradicts the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, which found no link between current storms and man-made climate change; he is apparently unaware that the rising costs of extreme weather are entirely caused by rising investment and insurance values, not rising quantities of extreme weather, as even a small amount of research would have told him ( http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/follow-up-q-from-senate-epw.html ); he falsely claims that I say rising sea levels will be beneficial, when I wrote no such thing; and he wholly ignores the benefits of mild climate change, even though I was careful to say that the key thing is to compare costs and benefits. It is possible that he does not know the meaning of the word “net”: he certainly shows no understanding of the concept.

“General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Mr Abraham’s main point is that up to 2 degrees C of warming is likely to do net harm. For this surprising claim, he produces noevidence. None. The evidence suggest the opposite – that less than two degrees of warming will cut excess winter deaths, increase average rainfall, extendgrowing seasons and increase rates of photosynthesis in wild and agricultural ecosystems. “A global warming of less than 2.5C could have no significant effect on overall food production,” says the UNFCC website.

http://unfccc.int/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/climate_change_information_kit/items/288.php

See links here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188913000092%00 and here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/.

And yet it is he who accuses me of “non-science nonsense”. It’s truly disgraceful that a tenured academic, as I assume Mr Abraham to be, should make so many mistakes and yet feel free to hurl unsubstantiated abuse at another human being, however desperate he may be. In writing about climate change I am careful not to make unprovoked ad-hominem attacks – until attacked in this way.

I always play the ball, not the man. Mr Abra

what you determine to be a monopoly is not. You are free to start up your own site and sell books.

You misunderstand what a monopoly is.

People might not buy from you but that's not because amazon has a side deal with the publishers (something Apple required with the MFN).

Wrong. Amazon does both Wholesale and Agency model. On both, they will adjust prices to match the lowest of the other retailers. For their agency model titles, that is the exact same MFN agreement as Apple had.
http://feldmanfile.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/most-favored-nation-landmine.html

And on it's wholesale model titles, it's arguably a MORE monopolistic practice. Cross subsidizing from their near book monopoly to make losses in ebooks in order to create another monopoly.

That and much of Assange's "attention whoring" really had nothing to do with him.

Most of his supposed "attention whoring" was actually the media looking for a drama and most prominently falling for the whole Domscheit-Berg FUDfest, you can read about it first hand from a real actual activist with a long track record and who was familiar with the two of them:

http://nothingispermanent.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/open-letter.html

Most of the "attention whoring" by Assange has actually been manufactured precisely to defame him. I can count the number of times Assange has wilfully put himself in front the press on one hand as it's usually been to talk about some key event in his story - his decision to enter the Ecuadorian embassy, his response to Manning's conviction and so on. I don't really see a handful of short sharp statements at a rate of maybe one or two a year as "attention whoring". 99% of the time it has been the press writing about him, rather than him going to the press.

EVE doesn't use IronPython. It uses Stackless Python. And yes, it is possible to decompile the code, and it has been done in the past.

http://evesupernerf.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/decompiling-eve-client.html
https://github.com/wibiti/evedec/blob/master/evedec.py

Now where am I going to find an identikit arena shooter based upon the Quake 3 engine?

Oh wait, here's a short list of a few of them

http://freegamer.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/quake3-total-conversions.html

Come on, the id Tech 3 source code was realised 8 years ago yesterday. Are there really no better engines out there?

According to the google blog post* the built in SSL stuff is fortunately not affected. So apps that simply act as clients over SSL should be fine. How many applications are there really that need crypto and/or secure random numbers other than SSL. I would think not that many and I would hope that most reputable designers of such applications would have heard about this and be working on an application side fix by now.

* http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/some-securerandom-thoughts.html

According to http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/some-securerandom-thoughts.html

"Applications that establish TLS/SSL connections using the HttpClient and java.net classes are not affected as those classes do seed the OpenSSL PRNG with values from /dev/urandom."

Google maps mobile apps just added adverts based on your location.

http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-with-local-ads-on.html

See, you might get beta products for free for years. But for Google the end goal is always advertising. Death or adware. That's the two possibilities.

You imagine that Google's location aware HUD device won't also be advertising the businesses and products around you? Dream on. It's the entire point.

The support for date and time handling in .NET is deplorable too, in my view. If it weren't, I wouldn't have bothered to create the Noda Time library (http://nodatime.org) which I'd like to think does a rather better job.

Having a single type (well, two with DateTimeOffset) to represent all kinds of different concepts is simply a bad idea. See my rant about this for more details:
http://noda-time.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/what-wrong-with-datetime-anyway.html

The EDL is to UKIP as the NF is (was?) to the BNP. The difference is that the EDL pretends to be about anti-Islamic-law and UKIP about anti-foreign-law-in-general, whereas in practice their members are about intolerance of strangers, general thuggishness, and victory of the (perceived) strong.

UKIP includes, on-topic for this thread, quite a number of homophobes.

You can stream and/or cache offline. You can have your mobile offline for up to a month at a time without having to check in again with the license server.

One thing to watch out for if you're using the desktop version: if you cache any playlists to use offline, Spotify then actually makes your machine a peer-to-peer server to take some load off the main server. You can't disable this in the settings, but you can set firewall rules to block or throttle it:

CONCLUSION

The only Requirement for Spotify is ALLOW Outbound Connections to "Remote Port" 4070 to *.ash.spotify.com (currently 193.182.8.3 - 193.182.8.90 or IP 193.182.8.1/Subnet 255.255.255.128).

http://mrlithium.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/spotify-and-opting-out-of-spotify-peer.html

Sure: http://owningyourshit.blogspot.co.uk/2013_04_01_archive.html

Private Eye, a fortnightly UK satirical and news magazine first raised this issue
almost two years ago. Here's a link to the journalist's blog article.

I don't know but it can't be that bad given indies are doing it. Go ahead and ask this guy: http://devbertil.blogspot.co.uk/ and I would suggest getting his game Gunman Clive. It'll control better on the 3DS than iOS so I'd suggest that version.