If the final assembly and sale of a laptop is done in the US by a US company, then the government can hold the company responsible for making sure there are no rootkits, in software, firmware, or BIOS.
If you know how to "make sure", short of re-installing everything from scratch from trusted sources at the software, firmware, and BIOS level, you should patent it, publish some paper, and make a load of money out of it. I am pretty sure it can't be done in a general way. And what if you don't trust the company that wrote the firmware or drivers for a particular piece of hardware? Plan to re-write it yourself? And if you do re-install everything with trusted code, malicious hardware can still do whatever it wants, and the technology to detect it isn't there either.
The conclusion is that whoever put the backdoor there or knew about it is responsible (and should go to jail, be fined, etc as appropriate). But you cannot hold some random engineer accountable because he didn't spot the backdoor: bottom line is you can't spot backdoors in a reliable way.
Any chance safe nuclear power has is set back when governments lie about risks or the extent of any accidents. The USSR government lied about the safety of nuclear plants and then lied to cover up the extent of Chernobyl. Residents of the Ukraine heard about the disaster from the BBC days before their own government. I heard this first hand from friends of mine who lived in Kiev at the time.
I saw a documentary on Chernobyl on German TV the other day. In Ukraine, they had a May day parade (on may 1st, Chernobyl was April 26th) with everyone out in the open where who knows how many people were contaminated, presumably leading to increased risk of cancer. There are no official photos of the parade: they were all destroyed, the documentary was showing the photos some guy had made.
So what it says is, it got a bunch of tax breaks during our worst financial issues ever.
It does not deny their lobbying efforts, instead they say they "comply with laws"...well no shit, if you write them..
What does "2.7 billion in cash taxes" even mean?
I don't know, but I would imagine they are at least paying payroll tax, and perhaps other stuff. The 0$ the article refers to is probably about the tax on corporate profits.
Not really, if you worked in multiple countries you could do the same thing. Why does GE have any motivation to pay the US tax rate when it's the highest in the world?
US tax rate is the highest in the world? You are kidding, right? Pretty much all developed countries have higher tax rates than the US
It is a gamble, but not as much as a gamble as sticking with symbian, symbian has been dead for a while
Symbian still has the largest installed base of any phone OS, and was just recently surpassed by android as the most sold phone OS. It may have strong in a lower-end market segment with lower margins, and it may have been declining, but saying it was dead is just US-centric uninformed drivel. Transitioning away from it with an application compatibility path provided by Qt may have been a good strategy, but by just dumping it for microsoft WP7 they are basically committing harakiri in emerging markets where they are by far the strongest phone maker.
But on the other hand I've seen dickish behavior by BOTH sides such as everyone cheering TomTom even though MSFT offered them the same RAND license for FAT32 they offer everyone else and got the finger even though they did invent the bloody thing.
Oh please, there was NOTHING remotely new in FAT32. No "invention" to be seen, just a basic engineering solution to a practical problem. If you told 10 engineers to solve that same problem (coexistance of 8.3 and more flexible file naming) half of them would have proposed a solution similar to what microsoft patented. Furthermore, patents on protocols and file systems and the like should be mostly useless thanks to interoperability exceptions.
That the patent was granted and enforced is a demonstration of the failure of the US patent system as persuasive as the amazon 1-click patent fiasco.
I’m no HTML technician, however I would assume it requires significantly more processing power. Your personal blog or website with 10 hits a day sure, run it over https and you probably wouldn’t notice much difference (aside from the cost of your own unique IP address). A large scale site however would probably have more hardware and bandwidth requirements to implement https on everything.
Gmail was switched over to https, and this is what the folks who did this have to say about the performance impact (from the link above):
In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead.
Later Firefox only had an all-or-nothing option when it came to cookies: accept all, or block all (with option for exceptions).
Firefox may still have it but it's buried; now in FF 3.6.15 I can not even find a cookies setting in the preferences at all! The only way I can find to get to the cookies configuration is via about:config. I may miss something but it certainly is not very obvious.
Not true. Firefox 3.6.15 speaking here: Edit/Preferences/Privacy: Unset the checkbox on "accept third party cookies", and set "Keep Until" to "I close Firefox". No harder than it was before. Also it is not a setting I frequently change so from the UI point of view I do not want a button or two-click access to it.
And good riddance. "WYSIWYG" programs invariably generate a spaghetti-like mess of a page that could had no semantic logic, and could only be practically modified by using the program in question.
You don't design in code. You design with Photoshop (at least for the final version) and then hand it over to people who understand code to implement.
Sure, but what about that vast majority of web pages out there which are not developed by a whole team of specialized professionals? I know a few people who do some pretty good web design, and none of them sketch it up and hand it to a dev team. Unless your web page is really a complex application that happens to run in the browser, one web designer is quite enough to produce a professional-quality webpage,
Flaunting local laws in such a country might not be a wise choice. The consequences might be, well, unfavorable.
It surely depends on the country, but even in most repressive countries encryption is NOT illegal, nor is reading my email, so I am not sure which laws I would be flaunting.
Standing back from your basement, I posit that you may not actually fully grasp this as something as scary as what the poster faces.
I won't take this personally, I think it is the way of slashdot to accuse everyone else of living in their mom's basement while casually dropping comments implying that one has a girlfriend or is a secret agent working behind enemy lines.
If I have a site that google has identified as a "bad link source", I can sell that as a service so companies can lower the rank of their competition.
I doubt it. Most reputation algorithms ignore (untrusted) negative feedback precisely for this reason. I think if your site is detected as a bad link source, its page rank is hard-set to exactly 0 so what you do or do not link has no effect on anything.
Before you start trying to figure out how to circumvent being spied upon by the host government, maybe you should look into the possible consequences of this. It may well be that if they find out that you're doing this, things could really turn out bad for you.
It's generally a good idea to try to actually obey the laws of the country you're going to, especially if it's as volatile as you say it is. If you're a foreign national and don't have any sort of diplomatic protections, you could be playing a risky game.
I don't think he is planning on organizing a coup or bombing a mosque. From how i read TFS it seems to be just a regular guy who wants to continue to do his email, post to slashdot, facebook, browse the web, without being restricted by a firewall or having his passwords sniffed or his privacy compromised. Setting up a VPN and doing all traffic through it seems to be a pretty reasonable approach. I'm pretty sure businessmen VPN into their company network from this kind of country all the time, so I doubt it will raise such huge red flags unless he is doing other activities that get him attention (say, getting arrested at a protest, or interviewing political activists or whatever, in which case stealthier security measures and plausible deniability are certainly advisable ).
Why the fuck would it matter? Bioshock's rated M, or 18+, or any other multitude of Adult Only, depending on region. When the game did so well with the rating, why wouldn't anyone think a film would?
It doesn't matter what the target audience is. Correct me if i'm wrong, but in the US, R-rated movies simply are not offered by most movie theaters, so adults also do not get a chance to see them. And on top of that, walmart and many others are not going to stock the DVD...
Well, yeah, yay free market! It's a privately-managed list, opted into by private businesses. Nobody is forcing bar owners to use the system, and nobody's forcing patrons to go to bars that do. If you don't like the idea of your biometric data floating around in some private database,...
There are many things that "private businesses" are not allowed to do in any reasonable country.
Fact: in europe the bar would not be allowed to store, let alone share with anyone, customer's biometrics without patrons first signing an authorization (and no, walking though the door is not a signature). Also, upon leaving the premises you could request they immediately delete any data they ever had on you.
I say that is a better system, and it is only a loophole in Australian law that allows them to do this. The loophole should be closed.
Apple devices are dirt cheap, these days the only people who don't have an iphone are those who don't want one.
You are delusional. Let's see, here in europe... iPhone=700 Euros. Top end android (galaxy S or HTC Desire) or maemo (N900)=450 euros. For no extra hardware.
Of course if you let a carrier charge you 100 dollars a month for 2 years they'll give you an iPhone and throw in a pony as well...
...if you like excessive nudity and bouncing breasts in your horror movies. There was some movie out recently where one of the female actresses ran around naked for something like five minutes, and the whole spectacle was recorded in titillating detail in 3d.
Agreed, but this part of the article had me intrigued:
It wasn't a totally perfect solution. Most specifically, ISPs can force a downgrade of https to http, but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
I do not know the ins and outs of internet routing well enough to understand this, but I was alarmed by it. Does anyone with more technical expertise in the area have any insight?
The slides are worth looking through. At the root it's a very simple concept: people do not type https into the browser, they usually get to https through a redirect from http. A MiTM can tamper with that and continue talking http with the client... or he can talk https with both client and server (two different connections), but then he needs to play some tricks to get a signed certificate for a domain that looks to the user like facebook.com.
but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
How would they know? the MiTM could easily talk https with facebook.
Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?
Right, but one of the advantages of digital is that you can take many shots to try and get the best possible shot, so even a cheapo amateur with an entry level DSLR can afford to press and hold the fire button to take 3 shots a second when taking a group portrait or a snapshot of something moving.
Yes, most of these photos are not worth storing long-term, but sorting through them is not really worth the hassle. I do go through them to find the few best ones I want to print or share online, but deciding which ones to delete just takes too long so I only delete the few photos that are complete fails (with wrong exposure or out of focus or something.. not so many of those with a modern DSLR, these things are magic!).
Personally I stopped shooting raw* precisely because it uses too much space, and because I don't do much post-processing anyhow as it is too time-consuming (I can spend half an hour anguishing over exactly how to crop a photo.. If I start fiddling with the colors I go into too-many-options overload).
The fact that the N8 and the N97 and other Nokia phones(and Android phones) have aped the iPhone form factor means that...
Sorry but, what are you talking about? The N97 has a slide-out, tilting screen that reveals a 4-row keyboard. And you're saying they copied that from the iphone??? And the N8, other than being a non-slideout, capacitive touchscreen model has nothing in common with the iphone... actually the N8 is one of the few recent high end smartphones that does not have the same iphony hardware design. The N8 hardware is IMO several steps ahead of the iphone (good camera, HDMI output, all possible sensor-goodies included and overall feels more solid), while apple admittedly has the sleeker UI.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
Honestly, the awesome bar is.. well.. awesome. It was sometimes way too slow in the beginning, that seems fixed now. But once you get used to it, it's addictive. I hardly use bookmarks anymore (only for obscure stuff I need to remember long-term), and everytime I try to use opera (which has a very nice UI overall IMO) I get frustated by the un-awesomeness of it's address bar...
For a product claiming to be "8.x", it sure could use a lot of refinement. They haven't accomplished anything special with the tab interface (the biggest reason I can't adopt it for primary use -- I need Panorama and if not that, at least vertical nested tree tabs).
Stop trying to add more redundant features to C++...
Did you even bother to read about what these supposedly "redundant" new features are? Personally, I think these redundant new features will help maintain C++ as one of the 2 or 3 most used programming languages for the next decade. Especially since this time all of the new features already have reference implementations, so the compilers will be very quick to implement them (GCC already supports a long list of them).
I would say the single most important feature is finally having standard support for threading and concurrency. Hopefully, this will gradually lead to a standard library of high-level abstractions for parallel programming as well as concurrent algorithms (did you ever try the parallel mode of the gnu stl? parallel sort on 8 cores is sweet...).
There are also a lot of little tweaks under the hood, that programmers will benefit from even if they never need to know about it, just by using the STL. For instance even if you have never heard of move constructors, they will make some methods of standard containers more efficient and make it possible to have a proper implementation of the new unique_ptr (useful for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization paradigm). And most of the added syntax is straightforward enough that it doesn' t really add complexity:
Initializer lists:
vector<string> v = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };
Slashdot Mirror
That bit of German history is very cool, thaks.
If the final assembly and sale of a laptop is done in the US by a US company, then the government can hold the company responsible for making sure there are no rootkits, in software, firmware, or BIOS.
If you know how to "make sure", short of re-installing everything from scratch from trusted sources at the software, firmware, and BIOS level, you should patent it, publish some paper, and make a load of money out of it. I am pretty sure it can't be done in a general way. And what if you don't trust the company that wrote the firmware or drivers for a particular piece of hardware? Plan to re-write it yourself? And if you do re-install everything with trusted code, malicious hardware can still do whatever it wants, and the technology to detect it isn't there either.
The conclusion is that whoever put the backdoor there or knew about it is responsible (and should go to jail, be fined, etc as appropriate). But you cannot hold some random engineer accountable because he didn't spot the backdoor: bottom line is you can't spot backdoors in a reliable way.
Any chance safe nuclear power has is set back when governments lie about risks or the extent of any accidents. The USSR government lied about the safety of nuclear plants and then lied to cover up the extent of Chernobyl. Residents of the Ukraine heard about the disaster from the BBC days before their own government. I heard this first hand from friends of mine who lived in Kiev at the time.
I saw a documentary on Chernobyl on German TV the other day. In Ukraine, they had a May day parade (on may 1st, Chernobyl was April 26th) with everyone out in the open where who knows how many people were contaminated, presumably leading to increased risk of cancer. There are no official photos of the parade: they were all destroyed, the documentary was showing the photos some guy had made.
So what it says is, it got a bunch of tax breaks during our worst financial issues ever. It does not deny their lobbying efforts, instead they say they "comply with laws"...well no shit, if you write them.. What does "2.7 billion in cash taxes" even mean?
I don't know, but I would imagine they are at least paying payroll tax, and perhaps other stuff. The 0$ the article refers to is probably about the tax on corporate profits.
Not really, if you worked in multiple countries you could do the same thing. Why does GE have any motivation to pay the US tax rate when it's the highest in the world?
US tax rate is the highest in the world? You are kidding, right? Pretty much all developed countries have higher tax rates than the US
The newer Mac laptops replaced that second Enter with another alt key. Fn + up arrow = page up, Fn + down arrow = page down
That sucks. I want my page up and down key. Yes, I know the trackpad can scroll.
And virtually every PC has a hard eject button on the drive. So what?
Optic drives are a relic of the past, a portable computer should not have one.
Yup Delete is Backspace and if you want forward delete hold Fn+Delete.
Sucks again. I know how to use the function key, thank you, but that is not a replacement for a real key.
I think if you actually bothered to learn how to use your Mac laptops keyboard you'd like it a lot better.
Translated from mac-fanboy to english this sounds like
If you actually let Apple reprogram your brain you'd like your Mac laptops keyboard a lot better
It is a gamble, but not as much as a gamble as sticking with symbian, symbian has been dead for a while
Symbian still has the largest installed base of any phone OS, and was just recently surpassed by android as the most sold phone OS. It may have strong in a lower-end market segment with lower margins, and it may have been declining, but saying it was dead is just US-centric uninformed drivel. Transitioning away from it with an application compatibility path provided by Qt may have been a good strategy, but by just dumping it for microsoft WP7 they are basically committing harakiri in emerging markets where they are by far the strongest phone maker.
Obligatory onion news video: http://www.theonion.com/video/new-google-phone-service-whispers-targeted-ads-dir,17470/
But on the other hand I've seen dickish behavior by BOTH sides such as everyone cheering TomTom even though MSFT offered them the same RAND license for FAT32 they offer everyone else and got the finger even though they did invent the bloody thing.
Oh please, there was NOTHING remotely new in FAT32. No "invention" to be seen, just a basic engineering solution to a practical problem. If you told 10 engineers to solve that same problem (coexistance of 8.3 and more flexible file naming) half of them would have proposed a solution similar to what microsoft patented. Furthermore, patents on protocols and file systems and the like should be mostly useless thanks to interoperability exceptions.
That the patent was granted and enforced is a demonstration of the failure of the US patent system as persuasive as the amazon 1-click patent fiasco.
I’m no HTML technician, however I would assume it requires significantly more processing power. Your personal blog or website with 10 hits a day sure, run it over https and you probably wouldn’t notice much difference (aside from the cost of your own unique IP address). A large scale site however would probably have more hardware and bandwidth requirements to implement https on everything.
Actually, not really. If you do it right, the performance impact from using SSL is negligible. Take a look at this article: http://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html
Gmail was switched over to https, and this is what the folks who did this have to say about the performance impact (from the link above):
In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead.
Later Firefox only had an all-or-nothing option when it came to cookies: accept all, or block all (with option for exceptions).
Firefox may still have it but it's buried; now in FF 3.6.15 I can not even find a cookies setting in the preferences at all! The only way I can find to get to the cookies configuration is via about:config. I may miss something but it certainly is not very obvious.
Not true. Firefox 3.6.15 speaking here: Edit/Preferences/Privacy: Unset the checkbox on "accept third party cookies", and set "Keep Until" to "I close Firefox". No harder than it was before. Also it is not a setting I frequently change so from the UI point of view I do not want a button or two-click access to it.
And good riddance. "WYSIWYG" programs invariably generate a spaghetti-like mess of a page that could had no semantic logic, and could only be practically modified by using the program in question.
You don't design in code. You design with Photoshop (at least for the final version) and then hand it over to people who understand code to implement.
Sure, but what about that vast majority of web pages out there which are not developed by a whole team of specialized professionals? I know a few people who do some pretty good web design, and none of them sketch it up and hand it to a dev team. Unless your web page is really a complex application that happens to run in the browser, one web designer is quite enough to produce a professional-quality webpage,
Flaunting local laws in such a country might not be a wise choice. The consequences might be, well, unfavorable.
It surely depends on the country, but even in most repressive countries encryption is NOT illegal, nor is reading my email, so I am not sure which laws I would be flaunting.
Standing back from your basement, I posit that you may not actually fully grasp this as something as scary as what the poster faces.
I won't take this personally, I think it is the way of slashdot to accuse everyone else of living in their mom's basement while casually dropping comments implying that one has a girlfriend or is a secret agent working behind enemy lines.
Perhaps living in Africa has given me a liaise faire approach to archiving mail.
It seems it has given you a laissez faire approach to spelling as well...
If I have a site that google has identified as a "bad link source", I can sell that as a service so companies can lower the rank of their competition.
I doubt it. Most reputation algorithms ignore (untrusted) negative feedback precisely for this reason. I think if your site is detected as a bad link source, its page rank is hard-set to exactly 0 so what you do or do not link has no effect on anything.
Of course, Dr Suess saw this long ago http://www.squidoo.com/thesneetches.
nice...
Before you start trying to figure out how to circumvent being spied upon by the host government, maybe you should look into the possible consequences of this. It may well be that if they find out that you're doing this, things could really turn out bad for you.
It's generally a good idea to try to actually obey the laws of the country you're going to, especially if it's as volatile as you say it is. If you're a foreign national and don't have any sort of diplomatic protections, you could be playing a risky game.
I don't think he is planning on organizing a coup or bombing a mosque. From how i read TFS it seems to be just a regular guy who wants to continue to do his email, post to slashdot, facebook, browse the web, without being restricted by a firewall or having his passwords sniffed or his privacy compromised. Setting up a VPN and doing all traffic through it seems to be a pretty reasonable approach. I'm pretty sure businessmen VPN into their company network from this kind of country all the time, so I doubt it will raise such huge red flags unless he is doing other activities that get him attention (say, getting arrested at a protest, or interviewing political activists or whatever, in which case stealthier security measures and plausible deniability are certainly advisable ).
Why the fuck would it matter? Bioshock's rated M, or 18+, or any other multitude of Adult Only, depending on region. When the game did so well with the rating, why wouldn't anyone think a film would?
It doesn't matter what the target audience is. Correct me if i'm wrong, but in the US, R-rated movies simply are not offered by most movie theaters, so adults also do not get a chance to see them. And on top of that, walmart and many others are not going to stock the DVD...
Well, yeah, yay free market! It's a privately-managed list, opted into by private businesses. Nobody is forcing bar owners to use the system, and nobody's forcing patrons to go to bars that do. If you don't like the idea of your biometric data floating around in some private database, ...
There are many things that "private businesses" are not allowed to do in any reasonable country. Fact: in europe the bar would not be allowed to store, let alone share with anyone, customer's biometrics without patrons first signing an authorization (and no, walking though the door is not a signature). Also, upon leaving the premises you could request they immediately delete any data they ever had on you.
I say that is a better system, and it is only a loophole in Australian law that allows them to do this. The loophole should be closed.
Apple devices are dirt cheap, these days the only people who don't have an iphone are those who don't want one.
You are delusional. Let's see, here in europe... iPhone=700 Euros. Top end android (galaxy S or HTC Desire) or maemo (N900)=450 euros. For no extra hardware.
Of course if you let a carrier charge you 100 dollars a month for 2 years they'll give you an iPhone and throw in a pony as well...
...if you like excessive nudity and bouncing breasts in your horror movies. There was some movie out recently where one of the female actresses ran around naked for something like five minutes, and the whole spectacle was recorded in titillating detail in 3d.
[citation needed]
Agreed, but this part of the article had me intrigued:
I do not know the ins and outs of internet routing well enough to understand this, but I was alarmed by it. Does anyone with more technical expertise in the area have any insight?
It's called SSL Stripping... It's an old issue, but a recent tool has made it a bit more mainstream. There's a presentation here: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/MARLINSPIKE/BHUSA09-Marlinspike-DefeatSSL-SLIDES.pdf. And a tool here: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
The slides are worth looking through. At the root it's a very simple concept: people do not type https into the browser, they usually get to https through a redirect from http. A MiTM can tamper with that and continue talking http with the client... or he can talk https with both client and server (two different connections), but then he needs to play some tricks to get a signed certificate for a domain that looks to the user like facebook.com.
but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
How would they know? the MiTM could easily talk https with facebook.
That's 3 to 5 cents a shot, not negligible.
Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?
Right, but one of the advantages of digital is that you can take many shots to try and get the best possible shot, so even a cheapo amateur with an entry level DSLR can afford to press and hold the fire button to take 3 shots a second when taking a group portrait or a snapshot of something moving.
Yes, most of these photos are not worth storing long-term, but sorting through them is not really worth the hassle. I do go through them to find the few best ones I want to print or share online, but deciding which ones to delete just takes too long so I only delete the few photos that are complete fails (with wrong exposure or out of focus or something.. not so many of those with a modern DSLR, these things are magic!).
Personally I stopped shooting raw* precisely because it uses too much space, and because I don't do much post-processing anyhow as it is too time-consuming (I can spend half an hour anguishing over exactly how to crop a photo.. If I start fiddling with the colors I go into too-many-options overload).
* Waiting for the chorus of "NOOOOOB!!"
The fact that the N8 and the N97 and other Nokia phones(and Android phones) have aped the iPhone form factor means that...
Sorry but, what are you talking about? The N97 has a slide-out, tilting screen that reveals a 4-row keyboard. And you're saying they copied that from the iphone??? And the N8, other than being a non-slideout, capacitive touchscreen model has nothing in common with the iphone... actually the N8 is one of the few recent high end smartphones that does not have the same iphony hardware design. The N8 hardware is IMO several steps ahead of the iphone (good camera, HDMI output, all possible sensor-goodies included and overall feels more solid), while apple admittedly has the sleeker UI.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
Honestly, the awesome bar is.. well.. awesome. It was sometimes way too slow in the beginning, that seems fixed now. But once you get used to it, it's addictive. I hardly use bookmarks anymore (only for obscure stuff I need to remember long-term), and everytime I try to use opera (which has a very nice UI overall IMO) I get frustated by the un-awesomeness of it's address bar...
For a product claiming to be "8.x", it sure could use a lot of refinement. They haven't accomplished anything special with the tab interface (the biggest reason I can't adopt it for primary use -- I need Panorama and if not that, at least vertical nested tree tabs).
..ouch, my mind hurts!
Stop trying to add more redundant features to C++...
Did you even bother to read about what these supposedly "redundant" new features are? Personally, I think these redundant new features will help maintain C++ as one of the 2 or 3 most used programming languages for the next decade. Especially since this time all of the new features already have reference implementations, so the compilers will be very quick to implement them (GCC already supports a long list of them).
I would say the single most important feature is finally having standard support for threading and concurrency. Hopefully, this will gradually lead to a standard library of high-level abstractions for parallel programming as well as concurrent algorithms (did you ever try the parallel mode of the gnu stl? parallel sort on 8 cores is sweet...).
There are also a lot of little tweaks under the hood, that programmers will benefit from even if they never need to know about it, just by using the STL. For instance even if you have never heard of move constructors, they will make some methods of standard containers more efficient and make it possible to have a proper implementation of the new unique_ptr (useful for Resource Acquisition Is Initialization paradigm). And most of the added syntax is straightforward enough that it doesn' t really add complexity:
Initializer lists:
Range-based for+auto types: