Cake-cutting algorithms, I love them. I've read parts of the book by Robertson and Webb and always wonder about unusual and new applications for them.

There are plenty of nice things where I live (and on the Internet), so what the heck do you mean by "we can't have anything nice"? Care to explain?

I believe him. Here my interpretation of what he said: "We share all bugs we find with large corporations except a small number of 0-day exploits for each system that we keep to ourselves and always up-to-date."

LOL, there are no anti-gay laws in Russia ... except when they are cited explicitly by government officials as a reason for removing a statue of Steve Jobs because Tim Cook announced that he is gay. Let me guess, Russia didn't invade and illegaly annex the Crimea either?

I guess it's time for you to turn off your reality distortion field.

Nice troll post. Just about only real distinction between a professional and a hobby programmer is that the former gets paid whereas the latter doesn't. I've seen just as much complete crap written by professionals than has been written by so-called amateurs.

Besides, you're missing the point. Everybody should be able to program his computer in the way he or she likes and the tools should be easy to use and completely unrestricted. Nobody forces you to use someone else's program if you have no confidence in his or her abilities.

I agree. I used to program in REALbasic, it was extremely easy to get reasonably good results and I generally had a great time with it and sold lots of high quality shareware. (I know, I know, REALbasic was also responsible for a lot of low quality shareware, no doubt about that, but you will always get this with such a tool.) As long as you didn't stumble over one of the many implementation bugs it was a lot of fun and the fastest way to develop. This was long before it became ridiculously expensive, back in the time when Andrew spit out one great and slightly buggy free update after the other, and even longer before the name of the language was changed to some silly meaningless word that I have immediately forgotten after I first heard it.

I'm still looking for a decent substitute, even after I've switched to more complicated and equally excellent cross-platform languages like Racket. Python and Freepascal/Lazarus come closest to it but aren't nearly as easy to use and beginner friendly in my opinion.

It could be a spy satellite and space junk at the same time. Perhaps the Russians like irony.

Really? You can be required to sign something with your name in the US even if you don't want to? If that's true, then you're not living in a free country.

Well, it's about as critical as living under a government with whom you disagree. Sure, you could leave the country and live in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea for the rest of your life, so you have no right to complain about your government ...

Why do companies want people to pay by phone? Phones are larger than debit cards, harder to handle for payments and much less secure. It doesn't any sense whatsover and will be an eternal security nightmare for all parties involved.

No.

The incredibility of such actions are one of the reasons why they are done, so I wouldn't discount her story so easily. The Stasi did similar things (well, of course, not on laptops but in the same spirit). It's very sad and hard to believe for halway decent folks but some people are extremely evil.

And I'll take none of them. Why the fuck would anyone pay with a mobile phone when you can just pay with a card?

It's not as if a phone is smaller than a card, easier to handle or more secure, this whole "phone wallet" idea makes no sense.

Wouldn't steal a car

We should protect absolutely no one from trolling. It's called freedom of speech. A troll can and should simply be ignored.

Regarding harrassment and bullying, these include behavior like slander and libel, stalking or even death threats. Apparently within the past five months or so such acts suddenly have become instances of trolling, which is a serious misnomer. Anyway, everybody is already protected very well against those things, no matter what gender. You can report such cases to the police if they fall under the criminal law like death threats or stalking, or you can proceed with a civil law suit or at least threaten one in case of defamation or direct insults.

I don't quite see what more protection anyone would need or desire. At least to me it is plain obvious that classical trolling (~the act of deliberately upsetting someone to get responses) should not be illegal.