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User: jeremyp

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  1. Re:...and adults too. on Bill To Require Vaccination of Children Advances In California · · Score: 1

    And it's not your job to behave like an arsehole and yet refusing to get your children vaccinated is behaving like an arsehole.

  2. Re:No disrespect to GCC, but why not LLVM? on GCC 5.1 Released · · Score: 1

    I'd bet £10 that, in all these cases there was a subtle bug in the code.

    For example, in C, shifting a 32 bit value by 32 bits is undefined behaviour. Intuitively, you might expect all of the bits to be shifted out of the number, the same as if you shifted it by one bit thirty two times. However, it is just as likely that nothing at all happens. I guess it is even possible to generate an invalid op code.

    Why? On 32 bit Intel, the field in a shift instruction is only five bits wide and you need six bits to represent 32. The compiler could compile a 32 bit shift as a 31 bit shift and a 1 bit shift or mask the shift amount leaving you with a shift of 0 or possibly even put 32 into that field thus setting a bit outside the field.

    Weird crashes that go away when you call particular functions or add local variables to a function are almost always caused by stack smashing bugs. For example, you might allocate an array on the stack and then pass a pointer to it in a function call. If the called function assumes the array is bigger than it really is (or is told that), it might write past the end of the array thus destroying something important, like it's own return address. Adding local variables makes a bit of extra padding so writing past the end of the array doesn't do enough damage to crash the program.

  3. Re:Poor Design... on Networking Library Bug Breaks HTTPS In ~1,500 iOS Apps · · Score: 2

    It's done the way it is because the alternative is unmanageable.

    Apple would have to introduce a way for app developers to add external dependencies to their executables and for those external dependencies to be downloaded, if necessary, along with the app. This is obviously all possible as the Linux and BSD package management systems demonstrate but it would mean Apple would have to maintain an enormous repository of external libraries and the app developers would have to regression test their apps against every single version of the library just in case downloading a new version breaks their app.

  4. Re:The UK Government Are Massively Out Of Touch on Assange Talk Spurs UK Judges To Boycott Legal Conference · · Score: 1

    The man is accused of releasing state secrets and threatening to release more.

    No he's not, he is accused of rape. That is the accusation from which he is running away. As far as I'm aware, there have, so far been no formal charges of releasing state secrets.

  5. Re:Can we be sure there are no exploits? on Linux Getting Extensive x86 Assembly Code Refresh · · Score: 1

    Get yourself a 65CE02. Every opcode is well defined and supported. 8B is STY abs,X

  6. Re:Is negotiation a skill required for the job? on Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bans Salary Negotiations To Equalize Pay For Men, Women · · Score: 1

    The process of buying a house or car would be much less painful if there were no negotiation. The market would still work. Everybody would know where they were.

  7. Re:We really should rethink web encryption. on Heartbleed One Year Later: Has Anything Changed? · · Score: 1

    Only if it is the private key.

  8. Re:You almost had me! on Coup in Arrakis Capitol Leaves Region in Flux · · Score: 2

    Two typos then. I'm pretty sure they meant the "capital of Arrakis".

  9. Re:Capitol? on Coup in Arrakis Capitol Leaves Region in Flux · · Score: 1

    I've noticed people making this spelling mistaek a lot recently. A capitol is a legislative building, frequently found in capital cities.

  10. Re:And what good would it do? on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 1

    Really? My mobile phone has a 64Gb SSD in it which is enough for several hours of video even in HD. It's significantly smaller than the tape storage devices that were used in CVRs until recently.

  11. Re:And what good would it do? on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 1

    The pilot murdered more than a hundred people by deliberately flying a plane into the ground.

    There's not much character left to assassinate.

  12. Re: And what good would it do? on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 3, Informative

    Aircraft have two blackboxes: the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR). The former records audio in the cockpit and the latter records data from various instruments and controls. In this case, they have found the CVR but not the FDR.

  13. Re:It depends on No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory · · Score: 1

    You didn't read their paper properly. They make exactly the point that you are making. i.e. that "writing to disk", in most cases, does not mean physically writing individual bytes to the disk. The abstractions provided by both the language and the operating system help to make the obvious implementation as fast or faster than naive programmer created optimisations. In other words, this is a confirmation of the saying

    premature optimisations the root of all evil

    There is a WTF in the paper and it is their claim that Python doesn't run in a VM.

  14. Re:This is a great excuse on GNU Nano Gets New Stable Release · · Score: 1

    I certainly wouldn't be caught using nano, not since our sys admin accidentally trashed a Linux system by editing the pam config file with nano. After he saved the file, nobody could log in anymore because nano inserted a line feed where a long line had wrapped in his terminal.

    We got the system back by booting from a live CD and using vi to join the broken line back together.

  15. Re:As a recent buyer of a mid-2014 MBP on Apple Doubles MacBook Pro R/W Performance · · Score: 1

    I gave my first gen MBP Retina to my brother when I refreshed it . It's three years old but he still considers it a pretty fast computer. Admittedly, I maxed out the specs when I bought it.

  16. Re:Idiot parent, hell half the world is below aver on Online "Swatting" Becomes a Hazard For Gamers Who Play Live On the Internet · · Score: 1

    Is it not already illegal to call out a SWAT team for spurious reasons? It's dangerous for the object of the prank and it means the SWAT team is unavailable for real call outs.

  17. Re:Postgres has referential integrity on Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB · · Score: 1

    That's just poor design on the application designers part. It should be obvious that, even if the customer hasn't moved, shipping addresses aren't necessarily the same as the office address.

  18. Re:I choose MS SQL Server on Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB · · Score: 1

    MyISAM is basically BerkeleyDB with a server process over it.

    I think that's unlikely. If it were true, it would be able to support transactions and more granular than table locking because BerkeleyDB does.

  19. Re:Stop trolling on Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB · · Score: 1

    They didn't provide a fact, they expressed an opinion. It's an irrelevant opinion given that other database servers also have had vulnerabilities.

  20. Re:HTTPS? on Ex-NSA Researcher Claims That DLL-Style Attacks Work Just Fine On OS X · · Score: 2

    Not even that. You can't do generalised virtual hosting with SSL.

    The host header is just a header like any other so the server can't figure out which certificate to use to set up the encryption layer. It is possible to do it in a restricted set of circumstances with a wild card certificate that matches all of the virtual hosts.

  21. Re:Swedish Charges/British Charges on Swedish Authorities Offer To Question Assange In London · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    GP means he fled from the jurisdiction of British authorities. He had been arrested in the UK and was on bail in the UK. By fleeing to the Ecuadorian embassy, he violated his bail conditions in the UK.

    Incidentally, by violating his bail conditions, he cost some of his supporters around £100k. He's not a nice man, in fact I think he is probably a rapist. That's the most logical explanation for why he skipped bail.

  22. Re:This sucks. on Sir Terry Pratchett Succumbs To "the Embuggerance," Aged 66 · · Score: 1

    Hosepipe attached to a car exhaust and fed back into the car. Sit in it with the engine running.

  23. Re: This sucks. on Sir Terry Pratchett Succumbs To "the Embuggerance," Aged 66 · · Score: 1

    Given the political importance of Christianity in pre-enlightenment Europe where being the wrong ind of Christian was literally a matter of life and death, any Bible published before the 18th century can be expected to be politically slanted. The KJV certainly fits into that category but since it was an English Bible for the English form of Christianity, we can be sure it was politically slanted in the right direction - all other versions of Christianity being corrupt papist nonsense or something like that.

  24. Re:When one door closes on Google Code Disables New Project Creation, Will Shut Down On January 25, 2016 · · Score: 1

    The trouble is that version control is fast becoming a monoculture. Soon git will be the only version control solution in town and it's a bit shit really. It's popular mainly because Linus Torvalds wrote it, not because it's actually technically a good program.

  25. Re:Unfair comparison on Homeopathy Turns Out To Be Useless For Treating Medical Conditions · · Score: 1

    It is often unethical to do a placebo controlled trial because the people taking the placebo are effectively condemned to death.