SeldomSoup

I don't think it does you any good to be honest here. The conclusion most employers would come to is that you're not cut out for CS work.

As someone whose desktop needs are pretty simple, I agree with this assessment. If you want a *nix that's point-and-click configurable, looks nice, makes it easy to install software, and generally doesn't get in your way, Mint is definitely the way to go. I've tried all the popular distros, from (X/K)ubuntu, to Debian, to Fedora, to Arch and others, and I inevitably keep coming back to Mint. Just my 2 cents.

Chrome does many things right. I use Firefox and am ecstatic about the new extension architecture, for example.

The French Revolution saw so much bloodshed for so little change (for the ordinary people at least).

Absolutely. Two days ago (before the open source announcement), I begrudgingly started learning Swift for a school project in iOS development. Now I'm itching to dive into the language.

> court-approved

Remember, this a secret court, whose judges are likely highly biased in favor the government, with secret proceedings where only the NSA gets to make a case. Not exactly a legitimate safeguard.

I also have reservations about the grandparent comment, but PRISM is still pretty awful.

> If you want to erase a drive fast then use the following command (where sdXXX is the device to erase):

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXXX bs=1048576

Question: is there a disadvantage to using a higher blocksize? Is the read/write speed of the device the only real limit?

We account for ~4% of the world's population and ~25% of the world's prisoners.

> I wonder what world you all live in in which this is a bad thing.

The world where we all depend on secure communications for autonomy of our own lives?

No, you'd just need one increment after all of them. An increment in every else-if block is redundant because only one condition can be executed per loop.

With the current code, you would need a counter increment for every if statement.

It's a cryptographic mechanism. MS has a private key they apply to each Windows update to mathematically prove A) they're the ones who issued it and B) the content was not modified in transit.

(I am not experienced in cryptography. This explanation might be a little simplistic.)

Seems like a redundant flag. Many utilities are perfectly fine reading from stdin if no [file] is specified, without any kind of -f flag.