They are: Promissory estoppel. It is like a one-sided contract - i.e. one that you do not have to sign for it to be legally binding for Microsoft.

There is no tide to speak of in Denmark. I'm not sure that we'd classify the sea between the islands (Denmark is basically an island nation) as "oceans". The tides are usually 1m or less, most pronounced in the eastern part facing the North Sea, much less pronounced in the western parts that sits in the Baltic Sea.

But the flat topology and the fact that most of Denmark is islands, there's a *lot* of coastline, and wind is a much preferred as renewable energy source here. I don't think people realize how much it is blowing here. Damned wind!

It is correct that generating most energy from wind runs the risk that prolonged periods with high pressure (which means little wind and clear skies == frezzing cold during winter) can not generate enough wind to meet the demand.

Another problem is that in large parts of Denmark (e.g. the entire Copenhagen metropolitan area) most households get their heating from centralized "surpluss" heat from electricity production - burning coal at the moment.

It is commendable not to waste heat,and as you can probably imagine, Denmark has a huge investment in this centralized heat distribution system.

But I'd like to know, where will we get the heating from once electricity is produced from wind and solar?

Good points. But while the API may not coerce you into writing performant code like (perhaps) the alternatives, it does not make it impossible or practically unobtainable. I will readily admit that I know very little about 3D programming, shaders and the like.

However, modern games are all built upon some form of game engine that in turn is typically used in multiple games. Few game developers write to the API anyway, so if the few (relative to number of games they support) game engines were optimized, wouldn't this difference go away?

Which brings us back to the developers of the game engines: If the developers of the game engines would invest the effort to create engines with high performance on Linux, multiple games would benefit from it immediately. OTOH, if the game engine developers *do not* optimize their code for Linux, there is very, very little actual game developers can do about it, short of creating their own game engine. Which is a monumental task.

Since you so dishonestly quoted text from an article without linking back to it, here is the link: http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

This concerns the "Prism" program - which since the initial bruhaha has been revealed to be little more than an automated way to comply with (presumably) lawful requests from law enforcement agencies. (Note: I strongly disagree with the constitutionality of having a secret court issuing secret orders; it totally undermines the democracy)

The participation in the automated system (aka Prism) does not require a company to comply with more FISA requests, nor does non-participation allow a company to *not* comply with FISA requests. It simply has no bearing on it.

Importantly, the automated system does NOT(!) allow the agencies more access to users' data. Each FISA request will STILL have to be considered on a
case-by-case basis, and lawyers for the company will STILL have to review all material sent to the agency through PRISM before hitting the "send" button.

And conspicuously absent from your quote is the fact that while Microsoft was mentioned in the title, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo were also mentioned.

Little information is available on the actual design of PRISM, and basically all of the speculation was based on this single slide from the Snowden leak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From that slide you can see that Microsoft was indeed the first company to comply with FISA orders through PRISM, but that Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk(?), YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple all followed.

So you are grossly misrepresenting facts, being dishonest and out lying about the information in a transparent attempt to taint Microsoft while letting Google of the hook. Now, why would you do that? Anonymous cowardly liar.

Not to nitpick, but danes refer to that centralized production as "surplus heat". The "surplus" heat is heat generated as a bi-effect from producing electricity.... - from coal. So, when the electricity all comes from wind, the danes need to find some other way to heat their houses during winter.

How do prepared statements handle the not uncommon situation where you want to include an "in" clause? For example:

select * from customers where city in ?citylist

This was the problem they tried to solve by dynamically creating a statement like:

select * from customers where city in (?city-1, ?city-2, ?city-3)

So, to generate the -1, -2, and -3 parts they relied upon the index of the array.

Only in PHP an array will turn around and bite you with it's dual personality as a hash table. A hash table where one key was not "-1" but rathersomething like (pseudo):

-1); drop table students; --

You cannot really fault the Drupal developers for trying to support this commonly occurring pattern, for which there are no good solutions with plain prepared statements. After all, if they could write secure code for a common problem that could prevent less experienced developers for falling back to error-prone and insecure string interpolation.

Don't get me wrong: The drupal developers is at fault. But they were set up by the criminally insecure PHP.

Should be outright banned.

While the responsibility for this rests with Drupal, they were set up by another strange design decision of PHP: The fact that arrays are also hashtables and vice-versa. There are *tons* of these strange design decisions in PHP.

Suggestion: For "trusted" repositories, toenable automatic updating, developers must sign the original install package with a certificate. Self-issued certs could be ok for this part. Any subsequent updates must be signed with the *same* certificate. If not, it will *not* automatically update - even if the repository is "trusted". OneGet clients will only allow auto-update if the product/vendor names are the same and the certificate public key is the same. Otherwise a warning should be issued and the local administrator should choose whether to trust the new cert going forward.

No!

If the DLL is indeed candidate for being shared (e.g. part of a shared product) it should put the assembly/DLL in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). This is a side-by-side store where the same assembly/DLL can exist in multiple versions.

If security vulnerabilities are found and a patch is released, only the version in the GAC needs to be updated, often by registering a new version with a manifest/redirection that will ensure that anyone requesting the old (vulnerable) version will be treated to the new (fixed) version.

Windows Installer does this. And supports patching.

Yes, Linux never solved dependency hell, it has been swept under the rug that is distro+version specific repositories. The problem is still very, very real, but if you constrain yourself to the repositories of the distro + version that you use, the package maintainers will have ensured that the package dependencies do not conflict with each other and with the version of the ABI that your distro+version is on.

DLL hell was *very* real in the Windows 9x days. Side-by-side assemblies was introduced with Windows 98SE (IIRC) - but really only became de rigueur with Windows XP. During the 9x days, software developers took advantage of the fact that nothing prevented them from writing files to the system directories. When they encountered a problem where they needed a DLL - they simply installed it in the system directory - often overwriting whatever was there before. Obviously this caused all sorts of problems where only the latest installed product had a robust state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Rather than leaving the dependency resolving responsibility to package maintainers, the Windows OS contains a brokering mechanism that will load the correct version of an assembly - even if multiple versions of the same assembly exists in the global assembly.

Linux package managers have dual responsibilities: Provide available software (with update mechanism) and ensure dependency hell does not rear its ugly head. Linux dependency hell is very real, once you step outside the repositories.

Windows has binary compatibility with software that was developed for Windows 95 / Windows NT 3.1 (where Win32 debuted). The dependency problem (called DLL hell in Windows) was solved with the SxS and the broader use of the Windows Installer package manager, which integrated with SxS.

Ahem. The youtube link (showing the flipping menus) shows a Linux desktop. It was intended by submitter jonas-supa to show how much more advanced Linux desktops are.

Lol. We have to wait for the Linux fanbois to explain why the hell Linux needs compiz and all of the (agreed: Horrid!) animations from that youtube link.

Way to go there, buddy.

The new Microsoft Time Telling and Instant Notification Wrist Computer Ultimate Edition

What? Google already uses a huge directory of "stop words" - words or phrases that should not be indexed. What is required is that they can create such stop words per link (article). Maybe they are not done with that yet, but it could certainly work that way.

The goal is not to suppress articles, the goal is to protect individuals right to privacy. Google does not control the article, and they should not remove all links (associations) to articles. But they can and should respect individuals right to privacy. So when an association is outdated, irrelevant or misleading they should - upon request - remove the association - not the article, not all the other links to the article.

And yes - that includes the right to delete associations between your name and a possible crime you committed 30 years ago. Most modern judicial systems (US the notable exception) recognize that when you've done your time you have "paid" your debt to society - and should have a chance to start over. If youthful stupidities will follow you your entire live you will *never* get a chance to prove that you have corrected yourself.

And this is NOT just for criminals. Controversies, your participation in demonstrations, debates, political parties, deliberate smear campaigns etc. all have the potential to seriously inhibit your chances with future employers.

Was the article removed in its entirety, or was the *association* between the name and the article removed.

Of course Google should not remove the entire article. That was never what the law said. If they did so, it was just another blatant attempt at manipulating opinions of journalists in the hope that journalists reporting will start sway public opinion.

If it was just the *link* between a commentator name and the article that was removed, i.e. you would still find the article through googling words from the content of the article, then what is BBSs problem?

Google is blatantly trying to manipulate public opinion through journalists. They are deliberately misinterpreting the law to create an impression of draconian consequences.