If you were staying up late to ride the hype train that is the Nintendo Switch only to find yourself hunting aimlessly for a pre-order button…. good news.
Nintendo was weirdly vague about when US pre-orders for their new $300 console would open up (outside of a tweet that mentioned a limited number of pre-orders at Nintendo NYC) but a bunch of retailers just pushed their pages live.
Here are the sites that seem to be up and running and, as of 12:25 am Pacific, are still accepting pre-orders
Amazon
Target
Best Buy
Gamestop (Update: Gamestop seems to be tapped out as of 12:32 am Pacific, but they might add more stock)
Meanwhile, Walmart seems to keep running “out of stock” and then suddenly getting another batch — so if all other options fail, check there too.

© Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/B7nbEINCw_A/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

Another JVM language, Haskell dialect Eta , has arrived on the scene, again centering on functional programming.
Intended for building scalable systems, Eta is a strongly typed functional language. It’s similar to Scala , a JVM language that also emphasizes functional programming and scalability, and Clojure, another a functional language on the JVM.
But Eta sets itself apart from such competitors because it’s immutable by default, it uses lazy evaluation, and it has a very powerful type system, said Eta founder Rahul Muttineni, CTO at TypeLead, which oversees the language. This combination allows static guarantees and conciseness simply not possible in Scala or Clojure.
Currently at version 0.0.5 in an alpha release, Eta is interoperable with Java, allowing reuse of Java libraries in Eta projects and use of Eta modules in Java. Strong type safety enables developers to tell the compiler more information about code, while immutability in Eta boosts concurrency.
Eta also features purity, in which calling a function with the same arguments yields the same results each time; function definitions are treated as equations and substitutions can be performed like in math. Eta proponents said this makes it easier to understand code and prevents a lot of bugs typical in imperative languages. « Purity allows you to treat your code like equations in mathematics and makes it a lot easier to reason about your code, especially in concurrency and parallelism settings, » Muttineni said.
Eta is « lazy by default, » meaning data stays in an unevaluated state until a function needs to see inside. This lets developers program without having to be concerned about whether they have done more computation than was required. Developers also can write multipass algorithms in a single pass. « Laziness allows you to stop worrying about the order in which you write your statements, » said Muttineni. « Just specify the data dependencies by defining expressions and their relationships to each other, and the compiler will execute them in the right order and only if the expressions are needed.  »
Plans call for fitting Eta with a concurrent runtime, an interactive REPL, metaprogramming, massive parallelism, and transactional concurrency. Support for the Maven build manager and a core library are in development as well, along with boilerplate generation for Java Foreign Function Interface imports.
More about Eclipse inventor Scala

© Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/612709/new-jvm-language-stands-apart-from-scala-clojure/?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=sectionfeed
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

Barely a week before he leaves office, U. S. President Barack Obama’s administration has authorized controversial new legislation that grants America’s 16 intelligence organizations access to raw communications data from the NSA’s surveillance efforts.
The New York Times reported that on January 3 Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed new regulations that permit the 16 divisions — which include the army, navy, coastguard, CIA and FBI — access to “raw signals intelligence information.” In the past, information passed on by the NSA was filtered so that an agency would only receive information deemed relevant to their request for data. Now, they will gain access to the full content stash brought in by the NSA’s surveillance dragnet, assuming that their request is accepted.
Analysts can later apply filters to focus on the more pertinent data, but the government has enacted this change to give its analysts access to more atoms of data. The idea being that they may find useful information that they would otherwise not have gotten.
The legislation marks a major step back for the privacy of American people, millions of whose phone, email and other communications records are picked up by the NSA as so-called ‘incidental data.’ Those raw details can now be perused by 16 further intelligence divisions beyond the NSA, all without a warrant.
Consider this point from the EFF :
In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, President Obama enacted reform that applied some limits to the NSA’s activities — including restrictions on data capture for non-US citizens and rules for storing incidental data — but this revelation marks a step back on any efforts to address the privacy of individuals. That’s particularly troubling given the uncertainty around how Obama’s successor, President Elect Donald Trump, will utilize America’s intelligence apparatus.

© Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/JomjBDVdvaI/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.