The second example--a general optimization of the engine that over-optimizes a corner case--is very difficult to pull off in these engines. When you consider that the over-optimization only occurs when the source is aligned a certain way things become very suspicious, because the engine isn't running against the source but an abstract representation of the code.

In today's engines there are also routines to strip out unnecessary and unreachable code, which is relevant because the code snippets added by the tester were extraneous and (slashdotted, so going from memory) unreachable. This means the bytecode would either have been generated and stripped or not generated at all.

Then consider that these engines are not actually running the bytecode but machine-optimizing it. So now you have a case where:

1. Extraneous and unreachable code is added
2. Extraneous and unreachable code is removed by the compiler to bytecode
3. The bytecode is further optimized to machine code
4. The code is executed

Step 4 is where the optimization is lost. This is why it's extremely unlikely that someone checked in code to attempt to optimize the engine which resulted in an over-optimization of the corner case.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but Timothy makes an excellent point about who we . Here's what Mr. Chambers originally said:

Here's what Mr. Compton said:

Neither one has the ring of a joke, neither one is in good taste, but the former is defended while the latter is fodder for criticism. Now, back to your comment:

If a complete stranger (and Paul Chambers is a complete stranger for 99.999% of the world) posted the bomb threat on Twitter and you were inside the airport you would probably want to know whether it's a real threat. It doesn't matter what the medium is: Twitter could simply be part of a new MO for a modern brand of terrorist.

In summary:

• No indication of a joke
• Posted on what amounts to a popular public forum
• Threatens death for potentially hundreds of people

That's not even considering the possibility that Paul really was setting up a secret plot to bomb the airport and the evidence simply hasn't been discovered and his friends simply didn't know. That would be rather embarrassing for these kinds of "I'm Spartacus" campaigns..

I believe the individual was referring to such bodies as the Alberta Human Rights Commission. These bodies have the ability to prosecute an individual for speech outside of the normal judiciary and without any of the normal protections you might expect from a judiciary. In that sense free speech takes a hard hit, especially when you have to wonder what solution the AHRC (and others like it) provide that the courts could not.

What a lot of people don't know is that a Soviet submarine captain actually gave an order to launch a nuclear missile during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his second in command refused to do so.

Precious few, if any, governments have these goals at the top of their list or anywhere in their list -- ignore the rhetoric and watch what they do. Corruption is the nature of nearly all governments simply because it's how business is done. You'd be amazed at how much of your priviledge of owning a computer and having electricity is the result of bribes and blatantly unethical behavior. Nor is peace their goal. The only goal is economic stability. Whether that means a non-combatant posture today or a brutal attack on certain citizens the next, the goal is only stability for the economy and outside investment.

I agree the US is guilty of the same atrocities they accuse terrorists of committing, but so are many countries. Your memory may be short, but history is quite long, and just because a few years have gone by without major war reporting doesn't mean they're suddenly pure and will never use weapons again.

So let's not be naive about anything here. Much of the criticism against the US is deserved, but it is not the only deserving country.

Scale is relative. The British and Roman empires were waging at least as many as we are, and were just as ruthless. Granted, that shows you where we're headed, but your statement is still wrong.

Offenders are really gonna get it now. This guy means business.

I work for a Fortune 50 that sells a product many would describe as slow and bloated. The former is true because of the latter, and the latter is true because of demand. When the product was younger it was sleek and fast. As a product tacks on features it necessarily becomes slower to accommodate them. There are possibly exceptions to that rule, but not many. Browsers are not an exception.

Either the software initializes the subsystem to support a feature at startup, or (as they usually try to do) it's initialized in the background. Unfortunately someone will come up with a killer use for that feature (either internally or externally) that requires support during startup. Invariably that means startup is slower. Tack on intricate and complex dependencies, eventually everything gets initialized at startup. Not to mention that once you ship a product, those APIs are officially supported, no matter how well they were thought out or how early they were introduced.

The perceived result is bloatware, yet there's nothing in the product except features that were demanded by the users. Firefox certainly isn't perfect, and I'm sure the developers would love to rewrite portions of the product, but most of those rewrites will gain maintainability rather than performance. Performance is usually something you squeeze out of what's already there, and both Chrome and Mozilla engineers are very capable at spotting opportunities.