I don't have points to mod you up, but the judges do need to have their heads and their asses examined.
In this case, I completely disagree.
Microsoft made the argument that a company having a patent but not producing anything shouldn't be able to ask for monetary damages. That is wrong. I can make an invention even though I know clearly that I don't have the money, talent and intention to turn this into a product that can be sold at profit. If I am better at inventing than at marketing it would be ideal to invent things and sell those inventions to others who are better at marketing. The fact that Microsoft uses the invention proves that it is worth money and that damages should be paid.
This is of course completely independent of the question whether the patent should be invalidated, or whether Microsoft is infringing on the patent. It is quite possible that a court outside Texas would have judged in favor of Microsoft, and stupid software patents should be (but are not) invalid, whether they are owned by Microsoft or used to extract money from Microsoft. But that wasn't what the judge complained about: He complained that Microsoft repeatedly told the jury to not award damages for reasons that were not in agreement with the law.
And since they tried to influence a court decision that was about $200 million, making them pay 20 percent for trying to convince the jury to do something that is clearly wrong seems fine.
A nice thing about the WebOS SDK is that the developer doesn't have to buy anything to develop for the Pre. One thing that turned me away from getting an iPhone is that I would have to buy a Mac if I wanted to develop for it.
Most people would have seen that as a good excuse to buy one.
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
That's what Apple's TextEdit or whatever it was called then did in the late 80's, probably since 1986 or 1987. The text was stored in the data fork of a file, and the complete formatting information was stored as a 'styl' resource in the data fork.
A negative credit report, i.e. you being strapped for cash, means that you may be susceptible to bribes.
And a positive credit report means that you may have been taking lots of bribes in the past.
Actually, as another person posted, your credit score is an indication how profitable you are to a money lending company, nothing else. You can have tons of cash, never borrowed any money, and you will have a very bad credit rating.
If you think $300 is too expensive for Win XP, get ready to pay $30,000 for a defect-free XP edition. On the plus side, the $30,000 software would never crash.
It wouldn't be that bad, because out of the $300, most is not spent on software development. You pay for sales, marketing, EU fines, support, and so on.
A problem with GUI software and bugs is: Would you consider "usability" to be something that can have bugs? If a user misunderstands a user interface, would that be a bug? If in XP the bubble "You have new applications" in the start menu covers the "Logoff" button completely, is that a bug?
You're absolutely right. If this guy didn't inform anyone except Mozilla, he's bringing browsers wars to a new low, by being willing to expose a majority of web users involved in e-commerce and other "secure" online access to his vulnerability for whatever the lead time of patching is, but exempting users of his favorite browser. IF that's what he did, that's ridiculous, childish, and petty.
Reading the article, there seemed to be a good reason to inform Mozilla first, because they were the most vulnerable. Apparently, to spoof say Internet Explorer, you need a certificate for "www.ebay.com\0.evilhackers.com", one for "www.amazon.com\0.evilhackers.com" and so on, but to spoof Mozilla-based browsers, a certificate for "*\0.evilhackers.com" will be accepted for _every_ site in existence.
If I had my way, all such "gag orders" would become invalid. Often they are used to avoid bad publicity that might be well deserved. This would in no way invalidate slander laws if what was said was false or somehow misleading. As long as what you have to say is true, you should be free to say it. You might have to prove its truthfulness but that is a whole different issue.
That would just make life more difficult for everyone. It would make certain compromises between consumer and manufacturer impossible. Say your iPod breaks and you are not quite sure if it was your fault or not. And Apple looks at it and they are not quite sure either. So you make a compromise: They give you a new iPod, and you don't tell anyone. What is the alternative without the compromise? The alternative is that Apple says it's your fault and you can only get your money by suing them. Which means you either give up and are worse off, or you go to court and everyone is worse off.
A family 'failing to do its job' is by their definition a family that doesn't comply with middle-class behavioral norms. What if your child says something at school deemed a bit too radical (such as 'Blair should be hanged in accordance with the Nuremberg laws...'
I'd tell them to go to Wikipedia and look up what the Nuremberg laws were. Tony Blair, not being jewish, would certainly have nothing to fear from these particular laws.
But a class action lawsuit isn't going to do you much good if the company itself is going out of business, which would be one of the prime reasons for an authentication server to go out of business.
Take Apple for example. To them, the DRM servers needed to play music bought from iTMS with DRM are nothing but cost. They have to balance "how much does it cost" against "how upset do customers get when we turn it off" or more precise "how much do we care if our customers get upset when we turn it off". They might switch these servers off while making tons of money every year.
iTunes music that was bought with DRM still has DRM. I can pay to upgrade it to be DRM-free, but I am not willing to do that (right now) because everything I want to do with the music can be done with DRM.
Fortunately you can easily remove DRM from iTunes music without any loss in quality (burn onto CD, then import back in a lossless format) at the cost of one CD and about 20 MB per song wasted. But since I can actually still play records that I got almost forty years ago, I find the thought that forty year old LP's might outlast music that I bought last year quite disturbing.
Useability? How do you rename a file in OS X again?
Oh yeah, you have to hold down the Command key, click on the file, then select Get Info, then change the filename and hit Okay.
You are either stupid and have never used a Mac, or you are lying.
How do you backspace?
On OS X, you have to hold down the Command key and then hit the delete key.
You are either stupid and have never used a Mac, or you are lying.
How do you run a program?
On OS X, you select Finder from the dock, then find the Applications folder, then find your app.
Do I need to repeat?
To rename a file, I click on the file icon and hit Enter. MacOS X is clever enough to know that I usually don't want to change the extension, so it selects the name without extension for editing. To delete a character or anything else, I press delete. To run a program, the ones I use a lot are mostly in the Dock, but the quickest way usually is Command-Space, first letter, return.
This article only proves that Apple's are expensive. That's it.
That's not it. It proves that Apple manages to sell 10 times more expensive computers in retail stores than the rest of the manufacturers together.
I could have written a article stating "Lamborghini made up a whopping 91 percent of the $200,000-and-up automobile market in June". Duh, because how many cars are over $200,000? But who'd you rather be, Lamborghini or Toyota? In 2007 Lamborghini sold 2,406 cars and made a ~70 million dollar profit. Toyota sold 2.6 million vehicles and made 14.9 billion dollars in profit.
I'll leave it to you to find which of your numbers is wrong, but Toyota never made $6,000 profit per car. And you are quoting 2007 numbers, in 2009 things are different: Speaking to reporters, Toyota Executive Vice-President Mitsuo Kinoshita said Toyota would make operating profits of $6.1 billion in the fiscal year ending in March 2009, a decrease of 73.6% from a year ago.
But mostly your numbers are misleading. Dell sells about five times as many computers as Apple (unlike your comparison, where with the the right numbers for Toyota their unit sales would be 3,000 times higher than Lamborghini). Apple makes about 60 percent of the computer revenue of Dell. But when you look at profits, Dell is nowhere near Apple. That's why Apple's market caps is almost six times higher than Dell (the iPod/iPhone business doesn't hurt. }
I mean, "mucking around with serial numbers"...seriously? The DMCA explains clearly what is and is not legal, and inventing a number that happens to coincide with an Apple serial number is certainly not.
I don't think the DMCA comes anywhere into it. Music with iTunes DRM doesn't play on the Pre (Ok, that is just my assumption. If it does, then they _would_ be in trouble). I don't think incompatibility is "technical measure to prevent access" in the sense of the DMCA, just like software that allows you to record your old vinyl records onto your computer is not in violation of the DMCA.
On the other hand... If iTunes gives the registration number to Apple's servers, and Apple notices ten thousand iPods with the same serial number, then clearly 9,999 of them must be stolen. Imagine having the police on your doorstep looking for a stolen iPod!
You don't have to clone iTunes. You just need an XML parser and file transfer tool. Let the user use iTunes to enjoy their music on their PC, and let the Palm software sync the library.
Yet somehow, Dell, HP and other companies that do their manafacturing in China, with Foxconn even, have managed to get by for a decade or more without any of their workers dying in suspicious circumstances.
Where do you get that from? Could it be that just nobody gives a toss if someone working for Dell or HP tops himself? Given the statistics quoted earlier, it would be very, very unlikely if nobody working for these companies in China had ever committed suicide.
And that's the point, if it was any other company you could brush it off as a random event. But Apple is notorious for its extreme attitude towards security, and if you think that wasn't the major contributing factor in all this, I have a bridge to sell you.
Apple isn't notorious for its "extreme attitude toward security". How many leaked news of HP or Dell products have you seen recently? I haven't seen any. Now what is the difference? Is the difference that nobody cares whether there is anything new coming from Dell or HP? Or are these two companies guarding their secrets in a much more extreme way than Apple? I suspect the latter, after all, they both build really exciting Windows-based computers that all the geeks love and not shiny toys like Apple does.
Somehow I think you bought a bridge and now you want to get rid of it.
I don't like playing cultural imperialist, but something about current Asian cultures seems to me to be broken: this isn't exactly the first suicide of its sort, or even an uncommon phenomenon,
There were 5,400 suicides in the UK in 2007. There have been more in other years.
Not only should the name give a clue, but the type of the variable should be available within the past 50 lines or so. I have a bigger problem with the readability of complex conditionals and the !ptr syntax helps. Actually I'm interested if you can give an example of good code where ptr == NULL is more clear than !ptr.
I once had to fixed a bug that was caused by a very experienced programmer changing "if (ptr != NULL)" to "if (! ptr)" because the latter seemed more clear to him, and against all company rules he checked in that change without code review because he was so experienced that his code changes didn't need to be reviewed.
If you read this and don't get it, then (1) read my description of the code change again very, very carefully and (2) it proves the point that you should compare pointers to NULL explicitly.
If, and only if "tun = 0; if (!tun)..." be optimised, since NULL is not guarented to be 0.
I left your comments about some C programmers out, because they just make you look like an idiot.
A "null pointer constant" is by definition either an integer constant expression with a value of zero, or such an expression cast to (void *).
NULL is guaranteed to be a macro that evaluates to a "null pointer constant", with parentheses around it if needed.
In certain contexts (when assigned to a pointer lvalue, or when compared to a pointer expression), the compiler will replace a "null pointer constant" with a null pointer of the correct type.
When used as the operand of &&, || or !, or used as the controlling expression in an if, while, do-while statement or ?: expression, a null pointer is converted to an int with value 0, any valid pointer that is not a null pointer is converted to an int with value 1.
When a null pointer is cast to in integer type, the result is 0. When an integer with value 0 is cast to a pointer type, the result is a null pointer.
The representation of a null pointer (that is what is stored in memory and what memcpy would copy) is not guaranteed to be all-bits zero, but the compiler guarantees that all of the above is still true.
Dereferencing a null pointer invokes undefined behavior. Whether the instructions that a compiler generates to do this dereferencing cause a crash is irrelevant, the fact that a null pointer is dereferenced is enough. This also applies to pointer arithmetic, where the code will usually not crash, but nevertheless is undefined behaviour. And it is quite clear in the definition of the C language that a compiler is allowed to always assume that there is no undefined behavior. The dereferencing of tun invokes undefined behaviour when tun is a null pointer, therefore the compiler is allowed by the rules of the C language to _assume_ that tun is not a null pointer. Therefore it is absolutely legal for the compiler to remove the test.
Ok, I know I shouldn't be feeding the troll, but read the article: the kernel source itself is perfectly fine, is the compiler that optimizes the check away.
Absolutely not. The code itself has a severe bug: If tun is a null pointer then it invokes undefined behaviour. Undefined behaviour means anything can happen. Anything can happen means a severe bug, especially in kernel code. The optimizing compiler just turned C source code that was buggy, but not obviously enough for the programmer, into assembler code that would have been obviously buggy to anyone. Most definitely not the fault of the compiler.
The value &(tun->sk) is the address of tun, plus a fixed offset. The expression &(((struct foo*)0)->bar) is valid C and will give the value of the offset of the sk field in the foo struct. A typical definition of NULL is (void*)0, and &(((struct foo*)(void*)0)->bar) will also give the value of the offset of the bar field.
Wrong. If tun is a null pointer, then the only valid operations are the following:
1. Assign tun to a pointer variable of a matching type or of type void*, which will set that variable to a null pointer.
2. Cast tun to another pointer type, which will produce a null pointer.
3. Cast tun to an integral type, which will produce the value 0 (and this is true whatever bit pattern the compiler uses for null pointers)
4. Comparing tun to a pointer of a matching type or type void* using the == or != operators.
Dereferencing a pointer, even if it is just done to calculate an address, is undefined behaviour.
Even simpler mathematical analysis would include such techniques as seeing which one takes up more disk space. Last I checked, that was very highly correlated with compression level.
And it would often be completely wrong because it doesn't take into account that some people re-encode images again. Like an image could be compressed to 100 KB in JPEG, then become a 4 MB BMP image, then compressed to 500 KB JPEG. I doubt it will look better than the same image, compressed directly to 200 KB.
Their efforts to claim that the UK had no jurisdiction over them failed because they were UK citizens, regardless of where they committed the crime. And the US can do the same to Americans smoking dope in Amsterdam.
Wrong. Most countries' laws say that in principle, most of their laws apply to anyone doing whatever deed _inside that country_. Whatever Americans do in Amsterdam, they will go to a Dutch jail if it is against Dutch law, and they won't go to any jail if it isn't against Dutch law. (There are few exceptions to this rule, but I don't think US law has an exception for taking drugs). The point was that the location of the server didn't matter, it was where the intended audience was (in the UK).
There would have been a difference if they had the right to be in the USA (US citizens, or a British citizen on a work-related Visa). In that case, extradition laws in the US state that you can only be extradited if it is a crime according to US law, and apparently hate speech isn't. Since they didn't have a right to be in the USA, they applied for asylum, and that failed due to lack of persecution in the UK.
No free speech in the UK, I get that (though I strongly disagree with it!), but why not offer asylum? Don't we believe in the right to free speech ourselves? Isn't this a perfect example of a situation in which we should, when someone comes to us who is being prosecuted for a crime that we do not consider to be a crime?
It is not that hate speech isn't considered to be bad in the USA, it is just that there is a balance to be found between the right of free speech and the right to be protected from hate crime, and the USA sets the balance slightly different than the UK, for example. Hate speech isn't fine and Ok in the USA, it just doesn't get punished as a crime because the law makers think that the right of free speech is more important. Therefore, convicting someone for hate speech isn't considered really wrong, it just means the UK strikes the balance slightly different than the US would.
Due to the way US extradition laws work, these people would not be extradited to the UK; for that their crime would have to be actually against US law, but they won't and shouldn't get asylum either.
still, i think the only reason the US didn't grant them asylum was because they didn't want a scandal with the UK. if those people were from, say, lebanon, i'm pretty sure the story would've had a different ending..
I think the reasons for not granting asylum were threefold: First, because the US government didn't want to be seen as a bunch of complete idiots. Second, because they didn't want the fuckers in the USA. Third, because they didn't accept their bullshit reasoning for wanting asylum. They were just as persecuted in Britain as bank robbers and rapists are.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have points to mod you up, but the judges do need to have their heads and their asses examined.
In this case, I completely disagree.
Microsoft made the argument that a company having a patent but not producing anything shouldn't be able to ask for monetary damages. That is wrong. I can make an invention even though I know clearly that I don't have the money, talent and intention to turn this into a product that can be sold at profit. If I am better at inventing than at marketing it would be ideal to invent things and sell those inventions to others who are better at marketing. The fact that Microsoft uses the invention proves that it is worth money and that damages should be paid.
This is of course completely independent of the question whether the patent should be invalidated, or whether Microsoft is infringing on the patent. It is quite possible that a court outside Texas would have judged in favor of Microsoft, and stupid software patents should be (but are not) invalid, whether they are owned by Microsoft or used to extract money from Microsoft. But that wasn't what the judge complained about: He complained that Microsoft repeatedly told the jury to not award damages for reasons that were not in agreement with the law.
And since they tried to influence a court decision that was about $200 million, making them pay 20 percent for trying to convince the jury to do something that is clearly wrong seems fine.
A nice thing about the WebOS SDK is that the developer doesn't have to buy anything to develop for the Pre. One thing that turned me away from getting an iPhone is that I would have to buy a Mac if I wanted to develop for it.
Most people would have seen that as a good excuse to buy one.
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
That's what Apple's TextEdit or whatever it was called then did in the late 80's, probably since 1986 or 1987. The text was stored in the data fork of a file, and the complete formatting information was stored as a 'styl' resource in the data fork.
A negative credit report, i.e. you being strapped for cash, means that you may be susceptible to bribes.
And a positive credit report means that you may have been taking lots of bribes in the past. Actually, as another person posted, your credit score is an indication how profitable you are to a money lending company, nothing else. You can have tons of cash, never borrowed any money, and you will have a very bad credit rating.
If you think $300 is too expensive for Win XP, get ready to pay $30,000 for a defect-free XP edition. On the plus side, the $30,000 software would never crash.
It wouldn't be that bad, because out of the $300, most is not spent on software development. You pay for sales, marketing, EU fines, support, and so on.
A problem with GUI software and bugs is: Would you consider "usability" to be something that can have bugs? If a user misunderstands a user interface, would that be a bug? If in XP the bubble "You have new applications" in the start menu covers the "Logoff" button completely, is that a bug?
You're absolutely right. If this guy didn't inform anyone except Mozilla, he's bringing browsers wars to a new low, by being willing to expose a majority of web users involved in e-commerce and other "secure" online access to his vulnerability for whatever the lead time of patching is, but exempting users of his favorite browser. IF that's what he did, that's ridiculous, childish, and petty.
Reading the article, there seemed to be a good reason to inform Mozilla first, because they were the most vulnerable. Apparently, to spoof say Internet Explorer, you need a certificate for "www.ebay.com\0.evilhackers.com", one for "www.amazon.com\0.evilhackers.com" and so on, but to spoof Mozilla-based browsers, a certificate for "*\0.evilhackers.com" will be accepted for _every_ site in existence.
If I had my way, all such "gag orders" would become invalid. Often they are used to avoid bad publicity that might be well deserved. This would in no way invalidate slander laws if what was said was false or somehow misleading. As long as what you have to say is true, you should be free to say it. You might have to prove its truthfulness but that is a whole different issue.
That would just make life more difficult for everyone. It would make certain compromises between consumer and manufacturer impossible. Say your iPod breaks and you are not quite sure if it was your fault or not. And Apple looks at it and they are not quite sure either. So you make a compromise: They give you a new iPod, and you don't tell anyone. What is the alternative without the compromise? The alternative is that Apple says it's your fault and you can only get your money by suing them. Which means you either give up and are worse off, or you go to court and everyone is worse off.
A family 'failing to do its job' is by their definition a family that doesn't comply with middle-class behavioral norms. What if your child says something at school deemed a bit too radical (such as 'Blair should be hanged in accordance with the Nuremberg laws...'
I'd tell them to go to Wikipedia and look up what the Nuremberg laws were. Tony Blair, not being jewish, would certainly have nothing to fear from these particular laws.
But a class action lawsuit isn't going to do you much good if the company itself is going out of business, which would be one of the prime reasons for an authentication server to go out of business.
Take Apple for example. To them, the DRM servers needed to play music bought from iTMS with DRM are nothing but cost. They have to balance "how much does it cost" against "how upset do customers get when we turn it off" or more precise "how much do we care if our customers get upset when we turn it off". They might switch these servers off while making tons of money every year.
iTunes music no longer has DRM, ...
iTunes music that was bought with DRM still has DRM. I can pay to upgrade it to be DRM-free, but I am not willing to do that (right now) because everything I want to do with the music can be done with DRM.
Fortunately you can easily remove DRM from iTunes music without any loss in quality (burn onto CD, then import back in a lossless format) at the cost of one CD and about 20 MB per song wasted. But since I can actually still play records that I got almost forty years ago, I find the thought that forty year old LP's might outlast music that I bought last year quite disturbing.
Useability? How do you rename a file in OS X again?
Oh yeah, you have to hold down the Command key, click on the file, then select Get Info, then change the filename and hit Okay.
You are either stupid and have never used a Mac, or you are lying.
How do you backspace?
On OS X, you have to hold down the Command key and then hit the delete key.
You are either stupid and have never used a Mac, or you are lying.
How do you run a program?
On OS X, you select Finder from the dock, then find the Applications folder, then find your app.
Do I need to repeat?
To rename a file, I click on the file icon and hit Enter. MacOS X is clever enough to know that I usually don't want to change the extension, so it selects the name without extension for editing. To delete a character or anything else, I press delete. To run a program, the ones I use a lot are mostly in the Dock, but the quickest way usually is Command-Space, first letter, return.
This article only proves that Apple's are expensive. That's it.
That's not it. It proves that Apple manages to sell 10 times more expensive computers in retail stores than the rest of the manufacturers together.
I could have written a article stating "Lamborghini made up a whopping 91 percent of the $200,000-and-up automobile market in June". Duh, because how many cars are over $200,000? But who'd you rather be, Lamborghini or Toyota? In 2007 Lamborghini sold 2,406 cars and made a ~70 million dollar profit. Toyota sold 2.6 million vehicles and made 14.9 billion dollars in profit.
I'll leave it to you to find which of your numbers is wrong, but Toyota never made $6,000 profit per car. And you are quoting 2007 numbers, in 2009 things are different: Speaking to reporters, Toyota Executive Vice-President Mitsuo Kinoshita said Toyota would make operating profits of $6.1 billion in the fiscal year ending in March 2009, a decrease of 73.6% from a year ago.
But mostly your numbers are misleading. Dell sells about five times as many computers as Apple (unlike your comparison, where with the the right numbers for Toyota their unit sales would be 3,000 times higher than Lamborghini). Apple makes about 60 percent of the computer revenue of Dell. But when you look at profits, Dell is nowhere near Apple. That's why Apple's market caps is almost six times higher than Dell (the iPod/iPhone business doesn't hurt. }
I mean, "mucking around with serial numbers" ...seriously? The DMCA explains clearly what is and is not legal, and inventing a number that happens to coincide with an Apple serial number is certainly not.
I don't think the DMCA comes anywhere into it. Music with iTunes DRM doesn't play on the Pre (Ok, that is just my assumption. If it does, then they _would_ be in trouble). I don't think incompatibility is "technical measure to prevent access" in the sense of the DMCA, just like software that allows you to record your old vinyl records onto your computer is not in violation of the DMCA.
On the other hand... If iTunes gives the registration number to Apple's servers, and Apple notices ten thousand iPods with the same serial number, then clearly 9,999 of them must be stolen. Imagine having the police on your doorstep looking for a stolen iPod!
You don't have to clone iTunes. You just need an XML parser and file transfer tool. Let the user use iTunes to enjoy their music on their PC, and let the Palm software sync the library.
Using Cocoa:
NSDictionary* theLibrary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithContentsOfFile: [@"~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml" stringByExpandingTildeInPath]];
NSArray* thePlayLists = [theLibrary objectForKey: @"Playlists"];
NSDictionary* theTracks = [theLibrary objectForKey: @"Tracks"];
and you can go from there. To check the exact file structure, run "Property List Editor" and have a look at the contents of the file.
Yet somehow, Dell, HP and other companies that do their manafacturing in China, with Foxconn even, have managed to get by for a decade or more without any of their workers dying in suspicious circumstances.
Where do you get that from? Could it be that just nobody gives a toss if someone working for Dell or HP tops himself? Given the statistics quoted earlier, it would be very, very unlikely if nobody working for these companies in China had ever committed suicide.
And that's the point, if it was any other company you could brush it off as a random event. But Apple is notorious for its extreme attitude towards security, and if you think that wasn't the major contributing factor in all this, I have a bridge to sell you.
Apple isn't notorious for its "extreme attitude toward security". How many leaked news of HP or Dell products have you seen recently? I haven't seen any. Now what is the difference? Is the difference that nobody cares whether there is anything new coming from Dell or HP? Or are these two companies guarding their secrets in a much more extreme way than Apple? I suspect the latter, after all, they both build really exciting Windows-based computers that all the geeks love and not shiny toys like Apple does.
Somehow I think you bought a bridge and now you want to get rid of it.
I don't like playing cultural imperialist, but something about current Asian cultures seems to me to be broken: this isn't exactly the first suicide of its sort, or even an uncommon phenomenon,
There were 5,400 suicides in the UK in 2007. There have been more in other years.
Not only should the name give a clue, but the type of the variable should be available within the past 50 lines or so. I have a bigger problem with the readability of complex conditionals and the !ptr syntax helps. Actually I'm interested if you can give an example of good code where ptr == NULL is more clear than !ptr.
I once had to fixed a bug that was caused by a very experienced programmer changing "if (ptr != NULL)" to "if (! ptr)" because the latter seemed more clear to him, and against all company rules he checked in that change without code review because he was so experienced that his code changes didn't need to be reviewed.
If you read this and don't get it, then (1) read my description of the code change again very, very carefully and (2) it proves the point that you should compare pointers to NULL explicitly.
If, and only if "tun = 0; if (!tun) ..." be optimised, since NULL is not guarented to be 0.
I left your comments about some C programmers out, because they just make you look like an idiot.
A "null pointer constant" is by definition either an integer constant expression with a value of zero, or such an expression cast to (void *).
NULL is guaranteed to be a macro that evaluates to a "null pointer constant", with parentheses around it if needed.
In certain contexts (when assigned to a pointer lvalue, or when compared to a pointer expression), the compiler will replace a "null pointer constant" with a null pointer of the correct type.
When used as the operand of &&, || or !, or used as the controlling expression in an if, while, do-while statement or ?: expression, a null pointer is converted to an int with value 0, any valid pointer that is not a null pointer is converted to an int with value 1.
When a null pointer is cast to in integer type, the result is 0. When an integer with value 0 is cast to a pointer type, the result is a null pointer.
The representation of a null pointer (that is what is stored in memory and what memcpy would copy) is not guaranteed to be all-bits zero, but the compiler guarantees that all of the above is still true.
Dereferencing a null pointer invokes undefined behavior. Whether the instructions that a compiler generates to do this dereferencing cause a crash is irrelevant, the fact that a null pointer is dereferenced is enough. This also applies to pointer arithmetic, where the code will usually not crash, but nevertheless is undefined behaviour. And it is quite clear in the definition of the C language that a compiler is allowed to always assume that there is no undefined behavior. The dereferencing of tun invokes undefined behaviour when tun is a null pointer, therefore the compiler is allowed by the rules of the C language to _assume_ that tun is not a null pointer. Therefore it is absolutely legal for the compiler to remove the test.
Ok, I know I shouldn't be feeding the troll, but read the article: the kernel source itself is perfectly fine, is the compiler that optimizes the check away.
Absolutely not. The code itself has a severe bug: If tun is a null pointer then it invokes undefined behaviour. Undefined behaviour means anything can happen. Anything can happen means a severe bug, especially in kernel code. The optimizing compiler just turned C source code that was buggy, but not obviously enough for the programmer, into assembler code that would have been obviously buggy to anyone. Most definitely not the fault of the compiler.
The value &(tun->sk) is the address of tun, plus a fixed offset. The expression &(((struct foo*)0)->bar) is valid C and will give the value of the offset of the sk field in the foo struct. A typical definition of NULL is (void*)0, and &(((struct foo*)(void*)0)->bar) will also give the value of the offset of the bar field.
Wrong. If tun is a null pointer, then the only valid operations are the following:
1. Assign tun to a pointer variable of a matching type or of type void*, which will set that variable to a null pointer.
2. Cast tun to another pointer type, which will produce a null pointer.
3. Cast tun to an integral type, which will produce the value 0 (and this is true whatever bit pattern the compiler uses for null pointers)
4. Comparing tun to a pointer of a matching type or type void* using the == or != operators.
Dereferencing a pointer, even if it is just done to calculate an address, is undefined behaviour.
Even simpler mathematical analysis would include such techniques as seeing which one takes up more disk space. Last I checked, that was very highly correlated with compression level.
And it would often be completely wrong because it doesn't take into account that some people re-encode images again. Like an image could be compressed to 100 KB in JPEG, then become a 4 MB BMP image, then compressed to 500 KB JPEG. I doubt it will look better than the same image, compressed directly to 200 KB.
Their efforts to claim that the UK had no jurisdiction over them failed because they were UK citizens, regardless of where they committed the crime. And the US can do the same to Americans smoking dope in Amsterdam.
Wrong. Most countries' laws say that in principle, most of their laws apply to anyone doing whatever deed _inside that country_. Whatever Americans do in Amsterdam, they will go to a Dutch jail if it is against Dutch law, and they won't go to any jail if it isn't against Dutch law. (There are few exceptions to this rule, but I don't think US law has an exception for taking drugs). The point was that the location of the server didn't matter, it was where the intended audience was (in the UK).
There would have been a difference if they had the right to be in the USA (US citizens, or a British citizen on a work-related Visa). In that case, extradition laws in the US state that you can only be extradited if it is a crime according to US law, and apparently hate speech isn't. Since they didn't have a right to be in the USA, they applied for asylum, and that failed due to lack of persecution in the UK.
No free speech in the UK, I get that (though I strongly disagree with it!), but why not offer asylum? Don't we believe in the right to free speech ourselves? Isn't this a perfect example of a situation in which we should, when someone comes to us who is being prosecuted for a crime that we do not consider to be a crime?
It is not that hate speech isn't considered to be bad in the USA, it is just that there is a balance to be found between the right of free speech and the right to be protected from hate crime, and the USA sets the balance slightly different than the UK, for example. Hate speech isn't fine and Ok in the USA, it just doesn't get punished as a crime because the law makers think that the right of free speech is more important. Therefore, convicting someone for hate speech isn't considered really wrong, it just means the UK strikes the balance slightly different than the US would.
Due to the way US extradition laws work, these people would not be extradited to the UK; for that their crime would have to be actually against US law, but they won't and shouldn't get asylum either.
Can I start a business in the United States selling alcohol to those aged from 18-20 and then flee to Britain when I'm arrested?
You can't. It's too late then. You need to flee _before_ you are arrested.
still, i think the only reason the US didn't grant them asylum was because they didn't want a scandal with the UK. if those people were from, say, lebanon, i'm pretty sure the story would've had a different ending..
I think the reasons for not granting asylum were threefold: First, because the US government didn't want to be seen as a bunch of complete idiots. Second, because they didn't want the fuckers in the USA. Third, because they didn't accept their bullshit reasoning for wanting asylum. They were just as persecuted in Britain as bank robbers and rapists are.