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I had a look at the rest of the code. Granted, it's a tad better than what you posted, but it is still ridiculously amateurish... He should definitely submit some of it here.

On the internet, being primarily a written media, it is kind of tough to tell a transposition error from an actual misunderstanding.

Note that the top answer there is actually mine. I'm rather well acquainted with this kind of error, as you have discovered. Not being able to edit Slashdot posts after submission doesn't help...

Where do you get "equals"? I've written down an association. Replace "-" by "" if that makes it more understandable for you; anyway "-" is clearly not "=" anyway.

And yes, there are infinitely many rational numbers between two natural numbers. However the number of rational numbers between 0 and 1 is equal to the number of all rational numbers, which again is equal to the number of natural numbers.

The point is that when you determine how many numbers you have (you count them), you do so by associating the objects with numbers. For example, consider the set {"Douglas Adams", "Scott Adams", "Terry Pratchett"}. To count them, you associate a number to each:

"Douglas Adams" - 1
"Scott Adams" - 2
"Terry Pratchett" - 3

So you see the set has the same number of elements as the set {1,2,3}, that is, it has 3 elements.

What I've done in the previous post is to (partially) write down a similar list with the rational numbers instead of author names on the left, showing that the set of rational numbers has as many elements as the set of natural numbers.

To avoid getting too much off-topic discussion, I refer you to Wikipedia and to this math.SE post for more information.

Or, if you want to try your hand at meta regex golf there's a place for that, too.

> How would they pull off such an attack

Pools issue only the "Merkle root" of the transactions in the block - effectively the header, which the individual miners then search for a sufficiently low hash for. The pool operator can insert transactions into the block and the miners would not know.

Part of the reason to use the Merkle root is that is independent of the number of transactions. Otherwise hashing would slow down as the network carried more transactions, you have a bigger block of data to pass around to the miners, and for them to crunch hash attempts on. You can see the Merkle root on the list of hashes of a recent block: https://blockchain.info/block-index/457566/000000000000000047665cb7d4db93f66bbdd969f42578588363e8e77e22e31f

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10479/what-is-the-merkle-root

This is the link that inspired my comment btw - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/409/31462

I'd be interested in a reference, if you find one.

As far as I know, this is an open question (see this for a lot of references) -- so maybe I should have said:

It may be that proving that ECC or RSA are breakable does not require a proof of P=NP or P!=NP -- for example, it's not known that you need fast factoring to break RSA".

Still, the other point stands -- proving that breaking RSA is not in P (or that factoring is not in P) implies proving P!=NP.

Linus Torvalds knew about Mercurial (though it was started at about the same time s git), but he still chose to complete the implementation of git. You can be sure Linus thought very carefully about he needed for the Linux Kernel before he did so. So git was superior to Mercurial for his needs. Now many more projects chose git for large projects with a distributed user base, so a large number of other developers find it best for them too. Amongst other things, git handles branches, and branch merging, a lot better & far faster than anything else.

see also:
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/mercurial-vs-git-its-all-in-the-branches
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/96933/why-did-git-get-so-much-hype-while-others-dont
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/85783

> wpa_supplicant and most tools that use it store an intermediate hash of the password
> See also http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/74500/wpa-supplicant-store-password-as-hash-wpa-eap-with-phase2-auth-pap [stackexchange.com]
>> Is there a way to store my password in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf as some hash instead of plaintext?
>> 1 Answer: Unfortunately I have to answer the question myself now. "Unfortunately" because the answer is "No, it is not possible".

Wat.

If you want the system to use a wifi connection as its primary--to boot and enable wifi, or to allow all users to enable wifi--the wifi connection must store the password in plaintext.

Not exactly. wpa_supplicant and most tools that use it store an intermediate hash of the password, since the password is hashed as a step in the process of logging into WPAx-PSK (which everyone is using WPA by now, right? Right?). This isn't perfect, since the hash is still secret and you can just copy the hash to another computer to log in with wpa_supplicant, but good luck figuring out what the plaintext password used to be in order to punch it into some gooey dialog box. Some WPA-EAP variants (generally using CHAP compatible handshakes) can do the same by storing an NT hash.

See also http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/74500/wpa-supplicant-store-password-as-hash-wpa-eap-with-phase2-auth-pap

I hadn't heard of this experiment until now, interesting. The mainstream media reports I saw about it all seemed rather heavy on sensationalism and light on facts. I dug a little deeper and found this, which does a good job of pointing out the many flaws in the experiment: Does wifi stunt cress growth?.

This one also provides a summary of the points in the original.

There's a question about that are Skeptics stack exchange - http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1178/are-wifi-waves-harmful

This is the answer:

===============

WIFi is non-ionising radiation and so has similar issues to other radiation using similar frequencies such as mobile telephones and microwave ovens. These produce heating effects. WiFi is not focused, so any impact should be very small and perhaps not measurable.

I am not aware of any health studies specifically on WiFi. There have been studies on mobile phones which has shown that while the phone is in use and held next to the head, there is small but measurable heating effect on human tissue. My guess is that it has less impact than standing at right angles to the Sun so one side of the head gets warmer faster than the other. Even then, these studies have produced no evidence that this has any health impact, positive or negative:

A large body of research exists, both epidemiological and experimental, in non-human animals and in humans, of which the majority shows no definite causative relationship between exposure to mobile phones and harmful biological effects in humans.
And per Dr. Michael Clark of the HPA, WiFi is a fraction of the energy of a cell phone:

“When we have conducted measurements in schools, typical exposures from wi-fi are around 20 millionths of the international guideline levels of exposure to radiation. As a comparison, a child on a mobile phone receives up to 50 per cent of guideline levels. So a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi should be taken out of schools, then the mobile phone network should be shut down, too — and FM radio and TV, as the strength of their signals is similar to that from wi-fi in classrooms.”
The Sun does emit ionising radiation (ultra violet) and that has significant health effects such as sunburn, pigmentation changes and Vitamin D production. WiFi's impact, if anything, is nothing like this.

If you're like me you're wondering exactly what the implications of this revelation are in the real world. This article and this discussion helped clear it up for me.

Thankfully, this PRNG likely isn't used in any implementation of OpenSSL. It also doesn't appear to be used, at least in newer versions, of Microsoft applications. It may be used in any older Java, and C applications though (especially those linking RSA's BSafe library).

If anyone has anymore information or clarification that would be great.

Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.

So move the decimal place and call it something else. Bitcents or something. (Not catchy, I know; purely illustrative.)

They are called satoshis.
1 BTC == 100,000,000 satoshis

There are also intermediate denominations like mBTC (micro bitcoin).
1 BTC == 1,000 mBTC

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/114/what-is-a-satoshi

Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?

Ask Patents might help with that.

...so unless you think the government has a secret back door into every encryption algorithm...

Where have you been man? See here.

There's a big difference between a backdoor in a published encryption algorithm and a backdoor in commercial encryption software/hardware. It's much harder to hide a backdoor in a well known algorithm that's been under international scrutiny. Though I do have my doubts about the ECC constants

The Nazis were democratically elected into power. If you supported democracy, you had to support the Nazis in 1939 (prior to their invasion of Poland in September).

I just have to comment this as I see it repeated often: I am sorry, but that's not really true. It's true they got a (big) foot in the door (about 1/3 of the votes in a background of a crisis), but that's about where democracy stopped and Hitler took over. If you're interested, I suggest you read a history book on the Germany and the Weimar Republic. Here's a couple of quick links with more info:

http://www.lobelog.com/no-hitler-did-not-come-to-power-democratically/
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-the-claim-that-hitler-came-to-power-democratically-justified

Even if you can perhaps argue about the 1933 election, there's no doubt that by 1939 Germany was not a democracy. In 1939 you had to be a fool to think otherwise, the nazis weren't exactly quiet about their authoritarian philosophy. I live in a neighbouring country, and by 1939 a lot of people here were certainly reading the signs, nervously.

must be using operating systems whose code can be reviewed and modified without Microsoft or any other third party's blessing

Though I agree, that a corporation can be forced by an authoritarian government to put a backdoor into their product, I don't believe, open-source software is immune against backdoors either.

There are scores of people with commit-access to Linux kernel, for example. If the NSA — or its counterpart from any other rich country in the world — put their mind to it, they could use any one (or more) of them to weaken the security functionality in there.

It does not need to be obvious — making the /dev/random's output slightly less random, for example, may reduce the time it takes to tap an ssh or ssl connection with this host from many years down to days. Same goes for PGP-keys generated on the affected host... Nor does it need to involve blatant coercion — the committer may simply receive a patch by e-mail with a fix to some other bug or an improvement, and fail to spot the weakening.

It could, in fact, have already been done years ago for all we know. Who knows, if this little problem was not deliberately introduced? And even if it was not — who knows, whether various security agencies exploited it from 2006 to 2013 the way Alan Turing et al exploited mistakes of the German radio-operators during WW2?

Is it easier to plant a backdoor into an open-source project than a closed-source one — and keep it there for a useful period of time? I'm not at all sure, what I'd bet on, to be perfectly honest. Both can done and, by all appearances, both have been done...

There was a kickstarter, blink(1) a little over a year ago that did the same thing - http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2013-01-01/759517#759517 (and in a nicer package).

I wanted something similar (visual cues for meeting reminders; my "email" system is on a KVM with other "dev" systems). I ended up getting the Dream Cheeky 815 USB Webmail Notifier (http://www.dreamcheeky.com/webmail-notifier) - the thing is designed for email notifications with webmail, but there's an Apache License 2.0 driver and helper app (http://dreamcheekyusb.codeplex.com/), which worked fine to drive the thing - the little command line app that uses the driver had enough functionality (gradual on, color change, and blink) that I didn't need to write any real code.

A little macro scripting, and it was working fine with Outlook.

A little bigger that the other solutions, so maybe not great for a rack (though it's probably about 1U so it would work fine), but works nice sitting on my desk under my displays . . .

Everyone can still install the app from the official CM web-site OR start thinking about switching to some competing app market. With Apple, you will come back to use the same app store, whatever outrage impulse you had. I see some difference here...

What changed in 4.4, other than Android Browser dropping plug-in support?

Apparently, Google removed some deprecated APIs; I'm not sure of the details. There is someone who released a modified version of Flash yesterday that will work in the Dolphin Jetpack browser (link), so saying that you "can't" use flash on a newer device is no longer strictly true. Saying that it's completely "unsupported" (both by Google and Adobe) seems to be accurate, though.

So how should hobbyist game development continue in the era of...

"Hobbyist" development never meant "free" development. You've always had to buy the computer, keep it fairly up-to-date, buy your development environment (unless you worked in something with a free compiler/interpreter), etc. A hobbyist is more likely to work with what they have (since, yes, they're more likely to want to minimize costs). For instance, someone without a cellphone (or uninterested in mobile development) might start playing with WebGL and HTML5 for a desktop's browser (or work in a compiled language, like I do).
Android has the lowest barrier to entry to develop at the hobby level, with free, multi-platform tools, including a system emulator and non-cell devices of various descriptions and price points.
Apple provides free development tools, as long as you're not planning on releasing to the App Store. A hobbyist can develop on their own device. Of course, that requires either a Mac or the knowhow (and disregard of EULAs) to set up an OSX VM.
For Windows Phone, Microsoft offers AT&T and T-Mobile phones with no contract. Microsoft also provides a phone emulator in the development kit. Of course, you'd need a copy of Windows in the first place, and apparently Microsoft wants you to pay a subscription to even be able to transfer the app to a physical device. Then again, Adobe software has always needed a Windows or MacOS system to run on, anyhow.

So, Android seems like the cheapest solution. If I were a wannabe mobile app developer starting with nothing, I'd buy a cheap PC, a cheap Android tablet or personal video device (OK, so just the cheapest that should be able to run what I want to write), and work from there.

Maybe you should read stuff from people who actually program:

http://www.utf8everywhere.org/

Here is some actual comments from boost developers:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/libs/locale/doc/html/recommendations_and_myths.html

Here is an actual proposal to fix filenames on Windows by translating from UTF-8 (filenames on Windows are the *only* reason people use UTF-16, and Microsoft's refusal to allow the a api to handle UTF-8):

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n3505.html

Long discussion with many points of view (including yours) but I hope this convinces you that there is disagreement with you:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/102205/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful

Here is somebody trying to patch boost to handle unicode by supporting UTF-8:

http://sourceforge.net/p/tinyxml/patches/54/

Just because someone at Fox News put "Noted Authority" on the Chiron under a TV guest doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.

I actually did a fair bit of research myself into this a few months back, to answer a question on History.SE. There is indeed a romantic notion of there being some undiscovered tomb with untold wealth in it. Then there's the reality:

• The Mongols didn't bury their dead. They practiced Open-air "burials".

  Depositing the corpse in the steppe was meant to sacrifice it to predatory animals. According to Mongolians this is the last virtous act a person can carry out. This idea is much older than Lamaism and exhibits a really strong shamanistic element of spiritual thought.

• All the assorted legends about where a supposed tomb might be came out of China (not Mongolia, where it happened) about 300 years after the fact, and describe things much closer to Chinese burial practices than Mongolian. In other words, they show all signs of being entirely made up.

finally

C++0x does not have "finally".
You'll have to implement it yourself, e.g. using a destructor.
See for example: http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/2864/an-implementation-of-finally-in-c0x

Police officers themselves rarely receive personal bonuses based upon tickets, but police departments absolutely obtain revenue from tickets. This, of course, leads to wonderfully corrupt practices like instituting ticket quotas and larger fines/stricter enforcement to control their revenue.

However, not all departments fall to abuse, and the quotas (when they exist) are never made public intentionally, so this issue usually flies under the radar.

Actually garbage collecting environments like the JVM deal with lots of small object creation on the heap much faster than compiled C++ for example.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/208656/java-heap-allocation-faster-than-c

It all starts with a pledge of allegiance...

...to the flag? Michael Jackson makes me gag. Used to play with little toys till he played with little boys. Pepsi-Cola burned him up; now he's selling 7 Up. 7 Up made him shit; now he's saying Coke is it.

... to the flag, whatever flag they offer? Never hint at what you really feel. Teach the children quietly, for some day sons and daughters will rise up and fight while we stood still.

There are plenty of ways to passive-aggressively protest state worship.

Heinlein did believe that more should be required to obtain the franchise than a breathing, warm body. See _Expanded Universe_, a book of fiction and non-fiction essays. In it Heinlein made plain that he still embraced much of the philosophy he wrote in Starship Troopers. The book was published in 1980.

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26352/did-heinlein-advocate-the-apparently-militaristic-if-not-fascist-society-of-sta

Link to the Permissions Denied app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stericson.permissions.donate&hl=en

It appears Cyanogen Mod used to have this feature.

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

Ok, lets use the information from stack exchange. They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million. Lets use 10% of that as the baseline. 1 part per million. The annual coal emissions are on the order of 1.7 billion *tons* of CO2 per year. 1 part per million would be on the order of 1700 tons of uranium per year. By contrast, Chernobyl had about 180 tons of nuclear material, and blew up once... Fukushima had about 10 times that much at the facility, the vast majority of which never left the facility. Three mile island contained all but trace amounts of the core material.

So in the history of nuclear power, coal has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere, and all of the nuclear accidents combined have released... wait for it... less than 300 tons.

Wow, just wow.

Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.

In fact the paper that the article you linked to is based on doesn't even support what the article says, but I guess you didn't read it.

The jokes on you with this old worn out troll script - recent photoshop versions adopted the gimp multi-window interface instead of that annoying single window thing.

?

I have CS5.1 and it definitely works in a single window. Haven't tried CS6 yet, but I'd definitely described CS5.1 as "recent". This page suggests that any change that may have occurred is an option that has to be specifically selected.

Streetlamps for pedestrian safety reduce safety

Bullshit. Street lighting has been found to reduce pedestrian crashes by approximately 50%.

peed bumps increase traffic crashes and reduce safety

Double bullshit. Overall, the treated streets experienced a 39 percent decrease in crashes per year after speed bumps are installed. The 39 percent decrease on speed bump streets is a statistically significant difference (t = 2.8) from 1.39 to 0.85 crashes/year, meaning crashes most likely do decrease on speed bump streets due to bump installation. As well as this gem which asks a different question but which provides the same evidence against your "common sense".

Not this time because we are hittiing physical limits. Your eyes can only see so many pixels when you're 10 feet away. Billboards are often printed at the amazing resolution of 30 dpi and you can't tell when you're 100 metres away.

1080p is plenty of resolution for video on a TV in your liviing room. I'd much rather see an increase in bandwidth to reduce compression artifacts and an increased framerate.

This is why we tell people to not roll there own crypto systems (particularly rolling your own cipher) if they are serious about security. http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2601/is-xor-in-a-cbc-like-mode-secure

You may be able to find one among the many sites shown here.

No promises, mind you.

Well, if a large Futurama-style device is acceptable then you can just strap a smartphone to your arm right now...

I don't know of any distros that completely eschew GNU. The two are very tightly integrated, originally the kernel was written to run gnu, and even now, it cannot be built but with gcc. While I believe that they have done much to contribute to the free software we care about, loads of people here on /. have some disdain for gnu, and with that in mind might want to ban it from their systems. You can do this by replacing the individual components. BSD userland has been successfully ported to linux, and with Plan 9 from User Space you can take advantage of some great ideas that came with Plan 9 (though if you care enough for the benefits of Plan 9 plumbing, filesystem namespaces, and networking, I might recommend you go with the whole thing - Plan 9 is much, much better designed than unix, we just need to port our software).

The main GNU components in all distros are usually glibc, gcc, and coreutils. If you don't compile anything, you don't need gcc, and if you're really into compiling, you probably use the llvm. Soon, it is said, LLVM will be able to build the linux kernel. As for the others, there are several packages available in most distributions that will replace them. Most likely, you will replace glibc with uClib and coreutils with BusyBox. You will lose some functionality doing this, but it is definitely possible to run a free system without GNU. I might point out that I don't think this is a great idea, and should go for it only if for some inexplicable reason, you dislike GNU.

Check out this answer for more info.

Bullshit...

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders

This is not about shareholder profits except for the few greedy fucks that gain from the mergers. In one point I will agree, this is American Corporate Capitalism and it is a mentality that will eventually take down this country more so they any terrorist. Mergers rarely help the greater social good and in the long run, that actually can run counter to shareholders (unless you are referring to micro-traders).

Indeed, Google is patenting the group balance-and-payment system, not splitting a restaurant check. There is a ton of prior art on this - I'm the CEO of Splitwise, a start-up that would be affected by the patent, but most of the best prior art comes from Billmonk and PayDivvy from 2006-2011 (or see Wie Betaalt Wat in Dutch).

For us, this represents a very weird turn of events. Google is simultaneously trying to lobby me / Splitwise for patent reform at the same time as patenting trolling us about what we already do. I've written a blog post about my most surreal week of business life here: http://blog.splitwise.com/2013/10/10/google-trying-to-patent-bill-splitting-while-lobbying-splitwise-for-patent-reform/

You can see a very detailed list of prior art on AskPatents: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/5182/tracking-and-managing-group-expenditures-google-patent-application-prior-a

It is one good reason for me, among many, to support patent reform :)

That's pretty much false. At the President's Cup, in Abu Dhabi, the record is 160 km in 6 hours, 21 minutes. Average speed, 25 km/h. That's faster than world record marathon runners go. It's in 6 stages, each longer than a marathon itself, but all in a single day. I don't think you'll ever see a human run 160 km in a single day, averaging 25 km/h while moving.

First of all, you don't have the compilers source code.

You have a compiler's source code and the binaries of multiple independently developed compilers or interpreters for the same language. After the bootstrap process completes, you should be several nines confident that this source code is the source code for the resulting binary, provided that the multiple independently developed compilers or interpreters don't all have an identical backdoor. The probability of all readily available compilers having the same backdoor is so small that the result of DDC is beyond reasonable doubt.

Even if you could be sure of that, the compiler was compiled with a compiler

The first Fortran compiler was written in assembly language. So was the first C compiler. So was the first Lisp interpreter. So were the 8-bit BASIC interpreters on late 1970s to early 1980s 8-bit home computers.

Option A is ridiculous. It basically says, verify the compiler is clean by looking at all of the source (an essentially impossible task)

I wonder why a widely used encyclopedia's article about an allegedly impossible task doesn't mention that it's impossible. And for programs intended to fit into a handful of kilobytes, such as the first Fortran compiler or a tiny C compiler, an audit is quite tractable.

You are always running an unvetted program unless you coded it in machine language from the ground up with custom hardware and toggle switches.

You mean like what Kevin Horton did with his NANDputer? In any case, I could take one of those 8-bit BASIC ROMs, desolder it, hook it up to toggle switches and LEDs, read it out bit by bit, and verify that it matches the disassembly. And yes, mass-produced 6502 CPUs and BASIC ROMs have been decapped and photographed to make sure no funny business is going on inside the ROM chip itself.

So we shouldn't make programming childish thereby completely alienating the people who will design the important stuff like controlling the electric grid or Martian probes.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Just because you dive into something head first and sidestep academia does not mean you can't pick up better practices as you progress. A strong foundation which mainly includes jargon and basic structural programming practices. From there you will begin to pick up on things like good commenting, clean design and error checking and handling. After that it goes into more technical aspects such as strengths and weaknesses of languages. There are great programmers who never studied at a university and are self taught. There are great programmers from some of the best universities in the world. I know one person who holds a masters degree in computer science and is a terrible programmer. I know one person who holds a four year degree in CS and music study who is an amazing programmer and composer. Its not the education that makes a great programmers but the person. People who mock the head first and self taught routes are often grad students with a chip on their shoulder.

Basically a good programmer is best described by the first reply to this post. The first line really nails it: "A good programmer understands that that they have to continue to learn and grow. They strive to do their best at every effort, admit to failures and learn from them." That also applies to many other fields but it hold true. Some people don't give a crap and produce just that, crap. Some people take pride in their work and feel a great deal of satisfaction from producing quality code that works, is reliable and efficient.

"You can't sniff for a valid MAC until you've already got your illicit one in the network."

On what planet and in what universe?

HTML5 is great for text. Like, basically, any markup language. If you write a novel or something, you basically just need text with less than a dozen markers for where chapters start and such. Then you send it to your publisher and they'll do their part.

Now if you write something more interesting, then HTML5 isn't the solution, mostly because there aren't any good editors and readers/browsers still don't guarantee you a good result. For stuff that requires DTP, you are better off with PDF today, and probably for a while.

And if you do your own typesetting, and/or if you want a professional look instead of the amateur crap that most word processing software (and most of the cheap DTP programs) generate, nothing beats LaTeX and nothing will in the forseable future.

Actually, thinking about that I need to rephrase:

Yes, HTML5 is great if you're an amateru posting a blog who doesn't care how your shit looks to the reader, because all of the 5 people reading your blog couldn't spot the difference anyway.

If you want to publish a book, if you care about writing and reading at all, if you don't want to contribute to the downfall of civilization, for fucks sake, think about typesetting.

Here's a few starters:
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/01/the-trouble-with-word-processors/
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110133/visual-comparison-between-latex-and-word-output-hyphenation-typesetting-ligat

Now if only there were a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor for OS X that's as easy to use as Pages - I'd be using it all day.

Here is a direct link to the map if you are wondering where you'll be the lightest :)

Where is the lowest spot?
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22613/lowest-gravity-on-earths-surface

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12474/what-happens-to-people-when-they-are-hit-by-a-phaser-beam/

Aside from going back to RSA with really large key sizes, what other options are there? Shamus Standard Curves were mentioned (here) but they seem to be obscure, to the point of not yet being within open source crypto, like PGP. Do we have open standards which the NSA hasn't touched?

The point is that tablets can come out with full Windows 8, which would be a game changer. You'd have full PC functionality in a laptop. Buh-Bye both Android and Apple.

Yes...for only a 10-15 GB tax on storage space. Compare that to Android, at typically 1GB to 3 GB (barring greedy developers over-reserving space for their proprietary pre-installed bloatware...)

Even on a 64 GB device, that's still a 16-24% loss, and of course it's significantly worse on a 16 or 32 GB device unless you're willing (and able) to keep *everything* else on a micro SD card. Good luck installing all of the rest of those bloaty legacy Windows programs you 'need'...however if these prove viable, maybe they'll have a chance.

See this link for an explanation:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49906/why-is-freebsd-deprecating-gcc-in-favor-of-clang-llvm/49970#49970

In short, mostly it's due to FreeBSD's issues with the GPL, not all of which are purely philosophical (it affects their funding, for one thing). On the other hand, if you don't have a beef with the GPL, it's probably best to stick with GCC, which produces more performant code.