One tactic I have noticed firsthand from early evaluations of pre-release Microsoft products is that they hype you up on lots of stuff, then tell you "it's just a preview release." So you get all excited, then you start to notice flaws... things seem a little half-baked... you have questions. Criticisms, even. But you kind of convince yourself "it's only a preview." Maybe you mention your reservations on some online forum, but someone immediately shouts you down: "Look you asshole, it's just a preview, everything will be fixed when it ships!" Or maybe your excitement gets the better of you, and you post, "It's going to be AWESOME when it ships and these minor issues are fixed!"
And then it ships... and not only are the issues you were concerned about not fixed, they turn out not to be so minor after all. But by then it's too late, because everyone has spent months talking about how awesome it is/has been/will be.
It's a tactic that has worked well for Microsoft on a few occasions. The Office 2010 Web Apps are one example. When they showed a preview, everything looked great. The Word documents on the screen looked exactly like they did in desktop Word. The catch? You couldn't edit them. Well that was no big deal -- they wouldn't ship it without editing capability in there, obviously. They just don't want to show it yet. So everyone was all pleased by how awesome it was going to be when the Word Web App shipped, and how worried Google should be because Microsoft's online word processor was so much better than Google Docs. But guess what? When they shipped it, documents were editable all right -- but the editor was a completely different component that nobody had seen yet. The view where the documents looked identical to desktop Word was just a file viewer. The editor was something completely different, and it handled Word documents only about as well as Google Docs -- and in some cases worse. But by then all the salivating reviews of the preview release had already been published, and Microsoft's marketroids had earned their bonuses for the year.
IS Security groups are already frowning on cloud services where I work.
And I'm sure they will continue to give companies like Microsoft a continued barrage of punishing, painful frowns.
On the other hand, "moving to the cloud" is basically a software-and-IT-support way of saying "outsourcing," and I see no evidence that companies plan to quit outsourcing whatever they can at any point in the near future.
I'm finding it anything but; but then, I am running it in a VM without a touchscreen or proper hardware acceleration. Still, I'm finding myself having to guess what to click on just to navigate these little toy apps it ships with. How do you go back to the previous screen? How do you close it? Do I right click this or left click that? It's inconsistent, and it's all frustrating to the point that I'm begging for it to stop, but I'm forcing myself to stick with it to see if it grows on me.
You would have a hard time finding a new PC today that ships with Windows 7 32-bit (and isn't the 32-bit-only Starter edition). Why not drop it and make all our lives easier?
A few reasons: 1. Not everybody feels it necessary to buy brand-new hardware to run a new OS. Windows 8 sounds like it will run on anything that could run Windows 7, so why drop support for machines arbitrarily? 2. Not everything that runs Windows is a PC. There are ATM machines, kiosks, and other devices that run Windows Embedded, which is based on the same core as "real" Windows (not CE). Some of those use 32-bit processors. 3. Microsoft is hyping the fact that Windows 8 will run on ARM, and as of right now, all ARM chips are 32-bit. True, it's a different architecture from x86, but I suspect there are enough code dependencies to require Microsoft to maintain a 32-bit tree just for ARM. 4. How, exactly, does the existence of 32-bit Windows make your life hard?
This means that the OS (drivers and stuff) must be modified specifically for each tabled/mobile vendors hardware.
But this is true for PCs as well. They have different CPU features, different motherboard chipsets, different graphics cards, different storage controllers. That's kind of what drivers are for -- you don't rewrite the whole OS to suit the hardware, you just install drivers. I really doubt ARM tablet designs will vary from each other so radically that it's impossible to write a common OS for them. ARM "systems on a chip" (SoCs) are becoming more commonplace, too.
That's incorrect; it does have activation. There's just no product key to enter. If you install it without a network connection, though, it informs you that it's not activated and a lot of the Metro personalization options are greyed out. I couldn't find an expiry date in the activation settings, but I expect Microsoft will "expire" the Preview by the time Beta ships to developers.
i found just jumping to the desktop view for desktop apps was fast and fluid.
I should probably get modded Troll for further stoking the ant-Microsoft flames, but it should be noted that "fast and fluid" is a new Microsoft code phrase that was repeated many times at the BUILD conference sessions. You will be hearing it a lot more as the Microsoft marketing push kicks into high gear.
Joke aside I spun the preveiw up in a VM and it wouldn't install. But that might be me messing up virtualbox...
It took me a bunch of Google searches and messing around to get it to install. I had to:
Enable VT-x in the BIOS
Create a VM with 2GB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive (dynamic drive is fine)
Set the OS type to Microsoft Windows/Other Windows
Enable VT-x, Nested Paging, IO APIC, and PAE/NX in VirtualBox
Set the chipset type to ICH9 and the IDE controller type to ICH6
I don't know if changing the chipset type is strictly necessary. I've since changed it back to PIIX3 and it seems to work fine. I only know that before I did all this stuff, I couldn't get the Preview to install. Also, when I got it to successfully install, the whole process went much faster than the 2-3 other times I tried it, when the install failed about 98 percent of the way into "Expanding Windows files."
And it requires using crappy Adobe software and logging into some Adobe account.
I don't see this as a big deal. Maybe you're on Linux; then it's a big deal.
And it tells the people running the service exactly which books you're reading; the local libraries delete all records of physical borrowing after you return it
I don't generally go out for conspiracy theories, but do you honestly believe that? The checkout for physical books at my library system is all electronic now, too. Do you seriously think the FBI/NSA/whoever doesn't have access to that information, even if it's inadmissible in court?
Seems like the best you can do, with any library system, is to check out a bunch of bogus books to throw off your profile. Seems like that's easier to do with an Internet-based ebook system than with physical books.
From what I understand the local libraries also don't support lending of books from some publishers who wanted to make them buy the ebook again after it's been lent a couple of dozen times.
Turn that around; the publishers unilaterally changed the rules on the libraries (after the libraries bought into the Overdrive ebook system on the basis that the big publishers were participating), and librarians responded by boycotting the publishers. The situation does totally suck, but it's the publishers who are completely at fault. I doubt you would "support" having to re-buy the same book every few times you read it, either.
The HP example was regarding its PC business, not its phone/tablet business. HP is reportedly trying to exit the consumer PC business, where it completely relies on Windows just like everybody else but Apple.
And, to be accurate, HP didn't produce WebOS, either. Palm did, HP just bought it (and couldn't figure out anything to do with it).
The difference being that a library is a public good, and your fees go to keeping its doors open also for people who pay less property tax than you, e.g. the poor, the elderly, children who live in foster homes, etc. If you just give $79 to Amazon, you're merely buying one more product to hoard for yourself.
Overdrive's selection, even for the largest library systems, is awful. Its a small spattering of books people may want to read, and thousands of books you can't give away.
This seems like an exaggeration. I've borrowed maybe a dozen books from the Overdrive selection at the San Francisco Public Library. I haven't been reading e-books for all that long. The SFPL seems to have a pretty decent selection, mostly fiction. If anything, the problem is that they don't have enough copies of the books you'd want to read, so you end up having to get on the waiting list. Also, most people don't know how to use the technology, so even if it takes them two days to read the book, they don't know how to "return" it before it automatically expires. In effect, every time someone checks out a book you're going to have to wait three weeks for another chance to get at it.
Actually, this is a myth. Public libraries buy lots and lots of books, typically hardcovers. They're already moving into e-book lending. Publishers want e-books to have a limited "shelf life," after which libraries must repurchase them, which a lot of people disagree with. But overall, libraries have done much more good for the publishing industry than bad.
Not to mention that many of the types of papers that are being fed to these machines are of the variety where not so many original words could be said at all. Organic chemistry.
Really? I never had to write any papers in organic chemistry class. I would have been thankful for one.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't use something like this; plenty of submissions lately are lifted wholesale from somewhere else, without even a trivial rephrasing.
I fail to see why a brief summary of someone else's article -- plus a link to it -- needs rephrasing. The original author's words are the whole point. The lame summaries are the ones when the submitter uses the summary as an opportunity to editorialize when they didn't even understand the article they submitted.
Tweaking and submitting would be removing the plagiarism, which would still be caught on the instructor side. I fail to see the conflict here.
But it doesn't have to be verbatim to be plagiarism. Changing a few words here and there still isn't the same as doing the research and writing the paper yourself. A paper is supposed to be a demonstration of what you know and how well you can articulate it. A paper that you swiped and then tweaked to pass a plagiarism review proves only that you know how to be a crook.
well you pay for the medical professional's advice and consultation outside the already incredible price for the hearing aid, so charging $2000 for a $100 device is really just an incredible abuse of power. This is why for profit medicare sucks.
It may be an abuse of power, but I don't know that it's the doctor who's the abuser. Doctors are probably forced to buy everything through "the approved channels" -- they can't just fly someone to China and come back with a suitcase full of $100 hearing aids, and they're probably not even allowed to distribute literature to patients about shopping for a grey market hearing aid on their own. So if a patient has to go to a U.S. doctor, then the patient has to pay the U.S. price.
It is funny, though. My parents, who are fairly Republican and were vehemently against "Obamacare," are already driving to Mexico to fill their prescriptions, where they cost something like 70 percent less. For some reason, my parents cannot see the doublethink of voting against healthcare reform despite the position they find themselves in. I think it's just the paralysis of fixed income -- you're so desperate to protect what you have right now that you will resist any change -- even though, deep down, you can feel the vice tightening around you.
In fact, I've never seen a hearing aid that needed a charger. The OP's story must be very, very old.
They're pretty commonplace. Like anything rechargeable, they're sold on the basis of "no more worrying about buying/replacing batteries." Think about people who travel and find themselves staying in RV parks in unfamiliar parts of the country, or who have arthritis and have trouble messing around with little batteries. A hearing aid that you can plug in and charge up from a wall socket is very handy -- provided, that is, it isn't built like crap.
Correction: Some insurance does pay for hearing aids. Blue Shield of California will cover them if you subscribe to one of a few specific plans, and only then if you purchase the coverage as an option. The coverage, if you choose to purchase it, will pay up to $2,000 toward hearing aids every 24 months... so it won't cover the cost of aids for both ears completely, and might not fully cover the cost of a single hearing aid, if the prices really are what are quoted here. And it's not clear whether you have to subscribe to the coverage before you go deaf... it's possible that you would then have a "preexisting condition" and you'd be ineligible for the coverage. Them's the breaks in the U.S. of A.
Sounds like your dad made a bad choice in hearing aids.
My point is, he chose from the only choices that were offered to him. I'm not sure if this was before or after he was forced onto Medicare -- but even then, he does pay extra for supplemental care. Nobody showed him anything high-tech. (He's not my dad, BTW.)
It should also be pointed out that getting a standard American plug into a 220V socket is the next best thing to impossible. It certainly wasn't done without some work on your dad's part....
Pretty much any hotel will give you an adapter. Some of the adapters will have warnings on them telling you only to use this or that type of device, but many don't. They probably should have known better, but then, all my high-tech equipment seems to be rated for 220V, so why?
I'm sure the average American household is well above that.
They may be counting single-occupancy dwellings as "households," but the important part is, probably a great many of the people who require hearing aids are either already on fixed income or are close to retirement.
And if there is a price bubble, the Chinese will be right there to correct it.
TFA claims the ones we're paying $2,000 for are already being manufactured in China for $100. The problem is that a hearing aid is technically a durable medical device. Many people prefer to consult with a professional to get the right model, correct fit, etc., and some states actually forbid hearing aids being sold by mail or by anyone other than a licensed professional. So that kinda puts a damper on the grey market for many people.
I remember my mom and her husband went on vacation and had some trouble with his hearing aid. Basically, he plugged it in to recharge it and the charger burnt out; it could only handle U.S. voltages. The couple staying in the room next door saw the blackened charger sitting in front of their door and asked what had happened. They found the whole thing very strange. They were European, and their hearing aid charger could adapt to any global voltage, and they had never heard of one that worked otherwise. If I remember right, the woman's own hearing aid was also significantly higher-tech than my mom's husband's. It was not only smaller, but it fit deep into the ear canal (I'm not talking about a cochlear implant, this was a hearing aid). The important thing here is that my parents, living in the U.S., had neither seen nor heard of either technology. Their doctor had given them a couple of choices for a hearing aid and they chose the better one -- which obviously wasn't as good as what you could pick up in Europe. I don't know what they paid for the hearing aid, but it seems to me like something funny is going on.
If you allow the use of a C++ compiler, you can write code in pure C or C++. Hence, C/C++. But then, it's never been particularly hard to troll a Usenet group.
Whether or not I have been arrested yet, forcing me to answer that I am a terrorist (assuming it's true) would still be incriminating myself.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's easy not to incriminate yourself if you haven't been arrested, because if you haven't been arrested you have the right to get up and leave. The problem is when you're coerced to talk by withholding something you otherwise want/need, e.g. the ability to get on an airplane. You have the right to remain silent, which includes the right to walk away from the machine, but you're given a strong incentive not to.
Slashdot Mirror
One tactic I have noticed firsthand from early evaluations of pre-release Microsoft products is that they hype you up on lots of stuff, then tell you "it's just a preview release." So you get all excited, then you start to notice flaws... things seem a little half-baked... you have questions. Criticisms, even. But you kind of convince yourself "it's only a preview." Maybe you mention your reservations on some online forum, but someone immediately shouts you down: "Look you asshole, it's just a preview, everything will be fixed when it ships!" Or maybe your excitement gets the better of you, and you post, "It's going to be AWESOME when it ships and these minor issues are fixed!"
And then it ships... and not only are the issues you were concerned about not fixed, they turn out not to be so minor after all. But by then it's too late, because everyone has spent months talking about how awesome it is/has been/will be.
It's a tactic that has worked well for Microsoft on a few occasions. The Office 2010 Web Apps are one example. When they showed a preview, everything looked great. The Word documents on the screen looked exactly like they did in desktop Word. The catch? You couldn't edit them. Well that was no big deal -- they wouldn't ship it without editing capability in there, obviously. They just don't want to show it yet. So everyone was all pleased by how awesome it was going to be when the Word Web App shipped, and how worried Google should be because Microsoft's online word processor was so much better than Google Docs. But guess what? When they shipped it, documents were editable all right -- but the editor was a completely different component that nobody had seen yet. The view where the documents looked identical to desktop Word was just a file viewer. The editor was something completely different, and it handled Word documents only about as well as Google Docs -- and in some cases worse. But by then all the salivating reviews of the preview release had already been published, and Microsoft's marketroids had earned their bonuses for the year.
IS Security groups are already frowning on cloud services where I work.
And I'm sure they will continue to give companies like Microsoft a continued barrage of punishing, painful frowns.
On the other hand, "moving to the cloud" is basically a software-and-IT-support way of saying "outsourcing," and I see no evidence that companies plan to quit outsourcing whatever they can at any point in the near future.
I'm finding it anything but; but then, I am running it in a VM without a touchscreen or proper hardware acceleration. Still, I'm finding myself having to guess what to click on just to navigate these little toy apps it ships with. How do you go back to the previous screen? How do you close it? Do I right click this or left click that? It's inconsistent, and it's all frustrating to the point that I'm begging for it to stop, but I'm forcing myself to stick with it to see if it grows on me.
You would have a hard time finding a new PC today that ships with Windows 7 32-bit (and isn't the 32-bit-only Starter edition). Why not drop it and make all our lives easier?
A few reasons:
1. Not everybody feels it necessary to buy brand-new hardware to run a new OS. Windows 8 sounds like it will run on anything that could run Windows 7, so why drop support for machines arbitrarily?
2. Not everything that runs Windows is a PC. There are ATM machines, kiosks, and other devices that run Windows Embedded, which is based on the same core as "real" Windows (not CE). Some of those use 32-bit processors.
3. Microsoft is hyping the fact that Windows 8 will run on ARM, and as of right now, all ARM chips are 32-bit. True, it's a different architecture from x86, but I suspect there are enough code dependencies to require Microsoft to maintain a 32-bit tree just for ARM.
4. How, exactly, does the existence of 32-bit Windows make your life hard?
This means that the OS (drivers and stuff) must be modified specifically for each tabled/mobile vendors hardware.
But this is true for PCs as well. They have different CPU features, different motherboard chipsets, different graphics cards, different storage controllers. That's kind of what drivers are for -- you don't rewrite the whole OS to suit the hardware, you just install drivers. I really doubt ARM tablet designs will vary from each other so radically that it's impossible to write a common OS for them. ARM "systems on a chip" (SoCs) are becoming more commonplace, too.
That's incorrect; it does have activation. There's just no product key to enter. If you install it without a network connection, though, it informs you that it's not activated and a lot of the Metro personalization options are greyed out. I couldn't find an expiry date in the activation settings, but I expect Microsoft will "expire" the Preview by the time Beta ships to developers.
i found just jumping to the desktop view for desktop apps was fast and fluid.
I should probably get modded Troll for further stoking the ant-Microsoft flames, but it should be noted that "fast and fluid" is a new Microsoft code phrase that was repeated many times at the BUILD conference sessions. You will be hearing it a lot more as the Microsoft marketing push kicks into high gear.
This is true, although Aero Glass seems to work (albeit slowly) even without the guest additions.
Joke aside I spun the preveiw up in a VM and it wouldn't install. But that might be me messing up virtualbox...
It took me a bunch of Google searches and messing around to get it to install. I had to:
I don't know if changing the chipset type is strictly necessary. I've since changed it back to PIIX3 and it seems to work fine. I only know that before I did all this stuff, I couldn't get the Preview to install. Also, when I got it to successfully install, the whole process went much faster than the 2-3 other times I tried it, when the install failed about 98 percent of the way into "Expanding Windows files."
And it requires using crappy Adobe software and logging into some Adobe account.
I don't see this as a big deal. Maybe you're on Linux; then it's a big deal.
And it tells the people running the service exactly which books you're reading; the local libraries delete all records of physical borrowing after you return it
I don't generally go out for conspiracy theories, but do you honestly believe that? The checkout for physical books at my library system is all electronic now, too. Do you seriously think the FBI/NSA/whoever doesn't have access to that information, even if it's inadmissible in court?
Seems like the best you can do, with any library system, is to check out a bunch of bogus books to throw off your profile. Seems like that's easier to do with an Internet-based ebook system than with physical books.
From what I understand the local libraries also don't support lending of books from some publishers who wanted to make them buy the ebook again after it's been lent a couple of dozen times.
Turn that around; the publishers unilaterally changed the rules on the libraries (after the libraries bought into the Overdrive ebook system on the basis that the big publishers were participating), and librarians responded by boycotting the publishers. The situation does totally suck, but it's the publishers who are completely at fault. I doubt you would "support" having to re-buy the same book every few times you read it, either.
The HP example was regarding its PC business, not its phone/tablet business. HP is reportedly trying to exit the consumer PC business, where it completely relies on Windows just like everybody else but Apple.
And, to be accurate, HP didn't produce WebOS, either. Palm did, HP just bought it (and couldn't figure out anything to do with it).
The difference being that a library is a public good, and your fees go to keeping its doors open also for people who pay less property tax than you, e.g. the poor, the elderly, children who live in foster homes, etc. If you just give $79 to Amazon, you're merely buying one more product to hoard for yourself.
Overdrive's selection, even for the largest library systems, is awful. Its a small spattering of books people may want to read, and thousands of books you can't give away.
This seems like an exaggeration. I've borrowed maybe a dozen books from the Overdrive selection at the San Francisco Public Library. I haven't been reading e-books for all that long. The SFPL seems to have a pretty decent selection, mostly fiction. If anything, the problem is that they don't have enough copies of the books you'd want to read, so you end up having to get on the waiting list. Also, most people don't know how to use the technology, so even if it takes them two days to read the book, they don't know how to "return" it before it automatically expires. In effect, every time someone checks out a book you're going to have to wait three weeks for another chance to get at it.
...and the publishing industry hates them.
Actually, this is a myth. Public libraries buy lots and lots of books, typically hardcovers. They're already moving into e-book lending. Publishers want e-books to have a limited "shelf life," after which libraries must repurchase them, which a lot of people disagree with. But overall, libraries have done much more good for the publishing industry than bad.
Not to mention that many of the types of papers that are being fed to these machines are of the variety where not so many original words could be said at all. Organic chemistry.
Really? I never had to write any papers in organic chemistry class. I would have been thankful for one.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't use something like this; plenty of submissions lately are lifted wholesale from somewhere else, without even a trivial rephrasing.
I fail to see why a brief summary of someone else's article -- plus a link to it -- needs rephrasing. The original author's words are the whole point. The lame summaries are the ones when the submitter uses the summary as an opportunity to editorialize when they didn't even understand the article they submitted.
Tweaking and submitting would be removing the plagiarism, which would still be caught on the instructor side. I fail to see the conflict here.
But it doesn't have to be verbatim to be plagiarism. Changing a few words here and there still isn't the same as doing the research and writing the paper yourself. A paper is supposed to be a demonstration of what you know and how well you can articulate it. A paper that you swiped and then tweaked to pass a plagiarism review proves only that you know how to be a crook.
well you pay for the medical professional's advice and consultation outside the already incredible price for the hearing aid, so charging $2000 for a $100 device is really just an incredible abuse of power. This is why for profit medicare sucks.
It may be an abuse of power, but I don't know that it's the doctor who's the abuser. Doctors are probably forced to buy everything through "the approved channels" -- they can't just fly someone to China and come back with a suitcase full of $100 hearing aids, and they're probably not even allowed to distribute literature to patients about shopping for a grey market hearing aid on their own. So if a patient has to go to a U.S. doctor, then the patient has to pay the U.S. price.
It is funny, though. My parents, who are fairly Republican and were vehemently against "Obamacare," are already driving to Mexico to fill their prescriptions, where they cost something like 70 percent less. For some reason, my parents cannot see the doublethink of voting against healthcare reform despite the position they find themselves in. I think it's just the paralysis of fixed income -- you're so desperate to protect what you have right now that you will resist any change -- even though, deep down, you can feel the vice tightening around you.
In fact, I've never seen a hearing aid that needed a charger. The OP's story must be very, very old.
They're pretty commonplace. Like anything rechargeable, they're sold on the basis of "no more worrying about buying/replacing batteries." Think about people who travel and find themselves staying in RV parks in unfamiliar parts of the country, or who have arthritis and have trouble messing around with little batteries. A hearing aid that you can plug in and charge up from a wall socket is very handy -- provided, that is, it isn't built like crap.
Correction: Some insurance does pay for hearing aids. Blue Shield of California will cover them if you subscribe to one of a few specific plans, and only then if you purchase the coverage as an option. The coverage, if you choose to purchase it, will pay up to $2,000 toward hearing aids every 24 months ... so it won't cover the cost of aids for both ears completely, and might not fully cover the cost of a single hearing aid, if the prices really are what are quoted here. And it's not clear whether you have to subscribe to the coverage before you go deaf ... it's possible that you would then have a "preexisting condition" and you'd be ineligible for the coverage. Them's the breaks in the U.S. of A.
Sounds like your dad made a bad choice in hearing aids.
My point is, he chose from the only choices that were offered to him. I'm not sure if this was before or after he was forced onto Medicare -- but even then, he does pay extra for supplemental care. Nobody showed him anything high-tech. (He's not my dad, BTW.)
It should also be pointed out that getting a standard American plug into a 220V socket is the next best thing to impossible. It certainly wasn't done without some work on your dad's part....
Pretty much any hotel will give you an adapter. Some of the adapters will have warnings on them telling you only to use this or that type of device, but many don't. They probably should have known better, but then, all my high-tech equipment seems to be rated for 220V, so why?
I'm sure the average American household is well above that.
They may be counting single-occupancy dwellings as "households," but the important part is, probably a great many of the people who require hearing aids are either already on fixed income or are close to retirement.
And if there is a price bubble, the Chinese will be right there to correct it.
TFA claims the ones we're paying $2,000 for are already being manufactured in China for $100. The problem is that a hearing aid is technically a durable medical device. Many people prefer to consult with a professional to get the right model, correct fit, etc., and some states actually forbid hearing aids being sold by mail or by anyone other than a licensed professional. So that kinda puts a damper on the grey market for many people.
I remember my mom and her husband went on vacation and had some trouble with his hearing aid. Basically, he plugged it in to recharge it and the charger burnt out; it could only handle U.S. voltages. The couple staying in the room next door saw the blackened charger sitting in front of their door and asked what had happened. They found the whole thing very strange. They were European, and their hearing aid charger could adapt to any global voltage, and they had never heard of one that worked otherwise. If I remember right, the woman's own hearing aid was also significantly higher-tech than my mom's husband's. It was not only smaller, but it fit deep into the ear canal (I'm not talking about a cochlear implant, this was a hearing aid). The important thing here is that my parents, living in the U.S., had neither seen nor heard of either technology. Their doctor had given them a couple of choices for a hearing aid and they chose the better one -- which obviously wasn't as good as what you could pick up in Europe. I don't know what they paid for the hearing aid, but it seems to me like something funny is going on.
If you allow the use of a C++ compiler, you can write code in pure C or C++. Hence, C/C++. But then, it's never been particularly hard to troll a Usenet group.
Whether or not I have been arrested yet, forcing me to answer that I am a terrorist (assuming it's true) would still be incriminating myself.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's easy not to incriminate yourself if you haven't been arrested, because if you haven't been arrested you have the right to get up and leave. The problem is when you're coerced to talk by withholding something you otherwise want/need, e.g. the ability to get on an airplane. You have the right to remain silent, which includes the right to walk away from the machine, but you're given a strong incentive not to.