In a sense, that is exactly what Bochs is. It's a true Virtual Machine in that it software interprets every CPU instruction, and emulates every piece of connected hardware - RAM, motherboard, video, network, usb, chipsets, etc - to do so. A truely fine tool for OS and hardware developers.

Until you have someone that has a slow internet connection, f.e sat-com where latencies are typically around 500ms or worse. A poor network, or bad mix of equipment, can make latencies really bad even on an otherwise good network.

For example, my Dell D600 from 2003 had a Broadcom networking chipset in it. The 1GBit interface had a problem with some Cisco routers. The previous routers it was on were 10/100 and it had no issue; but when they upgraded the router to 10/100/1000 the new router had an issue with the auto-negotiation. Until I figured that out, the network speed when from 100 megaibts to 17 kilobits. Outlook generally worked okay (no choice at that company) but anything that made more use of the network had big issues. (Outlook worked to view what was in my inbox, because of the small messages; but even then it was slow).

So even doing something like that would be risky - of course, you could also just capture the network traffic and hack that too; since you can control the network in Bochs, if you were really going that far it wouldn't be an issue to capture and adjust it as required to make it think it was talking to the real thing. This is actually relatively easy:

1. Setup a transparent MITM proxy so SSL connections can be handled and neither side necessarily knows about it; though they would have to allow you to specify a client proxy because some places require you to do so to get to the Internet any how, so you could just use a client proxy too.
2. capture the network traffic using tools like Wireshark for several different runs of the program

3. compare the deltas to figure out what is changing

Now you just setup a server to either play back the captured data, making the emulated system think it is running at that point when the older software did, or if you figured out enough of the traffic setup something to fake the other side in a way you control.

FYI - this is how SaMBa got started (at least for Windows compatibility) - network analysis of CIFS/SMB traffic with Windows. They found some interesting things doing so - read their docs for things like single-bit flip reboots the Windows computer kind of stuff.

There's very little that cannot be cracked in this regard.

You do realize that KDE is maintained on more than just Linux - including BSDs, Unix, Mac, and even *gasp* Windows. Some ports (like the Windows port) are not as far along as the others - well, pretty much just the Windows port last I checked, and that's primarily because of Windows not having some of the requisite functionality yet.

Which is why you just treat the SVN repository as a WebDAV network drive. They user knows nothing about the underlying versioning going on, and you can always capture back the old version.

Additionally, tools like TortoiseSVN (well, technical TortoiseMerge written by the TSVN devs) have support for comparing MS Office documents. You have to have MS Office installed as it loads both into MS Office and runs the comparison functionality within MS Office to do the diffs.

That is why I usually recommend Subversion - because you can just mount Subversion like a network drive since it uses WebDAV as its base protocol. I've done that with several managers and it works well.

And there's no additional cost.

The problem now, though, is that Microsoft is removing their WebDAV FS drivers from Windows.

Until you adjust the base clock so that the software running under bochs thinks it is running at 1GHz while in reality it may be running at 1 instruction per minute. Yes - it's possible to do since Bochs doesn't rely on host system for any hardware, unless you introduce the qemu module for Linux to bring it to near native speeds but someone employing this kind of reverse engineering wouldn't want to do so.

This is possible because Bochs is a 100% software emulated computer. They emulate everything, and even have their own motherboard and video card (VGA) BIOS stacks.

You do realize that Bochs does software emulation of each instruction, and that you can control every aspect of the emulated computer don't you?

If you are running something under Bochs or something like it and don't care about the performance you can actually make it lie to the software underneath about timing so that the software still thinks it is running at the normal rate but in reality it isn't - Bochs after all implements the base system clock not relying on an external source. This is also why Bochs can be used to run x86 software on a non-x86 platform (f.e Sparc, PowerPC, ARM).

Yes, Bochs is dog slow; but it's a matter of how you configure it. And to be truthful, because of how Bochs is implemented I'm sure that it can be made to fool any of those detections.

Not to mention that it is extremely hard for a program to detect that it is inside a VM like Bochs unless the VM exposes something that can be detected - e.g a BIOS string, hardware signature, etc. Even then, that's easy for a cracker to fix by modifying the VM to have a different string or hardware signature.

Google Wallet - they very well may.

Well, not quite. FDIC (e.g government) takes the hit as the bank's insurer. So yes, the bank isn't risking much anything by not implementing strong protections.

This is why government is usually not the solution. However, the FDIC is necessary but perhaps the FDIC should start requiring stronger online protections as part of the insurance program...then again, the FDIC might not care enough....

Again, compared to existing Pi use-cases where the compiler is on the Pi system itself. So now you can't develop with just a RasberryPi, you have to have another Windows System too.

That too doesn't resolve the Device Driver issue; it also means users have to install and learn how to use the Visual Studios Remote Debugger or learn more advanced (older style) debugging techniques.

All those things are not in the favor of Windows for development of software for a RasberryPi or Pi2 device.

...a project that people are already complaining about not addressing bugs quickly enough is integrating another, potentially dead, project that is not addressing bugs even as fast as it is. Make sense.

Kind of like the HP and Compaq merger 10 years back - two bankrupt companies merging to try to create a healthy company; worked out for a little while and now HP is spinning stuff off again.

Devuan will at least give you the choice; unlike Debian which is going to be requiring it as of Deb8. (Devuan's goal is to be a seamless upgrade from Deb7).

Except you are not simply talking about government. You are also talking about HOA's and similar communities.

For instance, one of my friend's bought a house in a community 15-20 years back. The CableTV companies didn't want anything to do with the community; so they ran their own lines to everyone's house. It was simply an HOA that did the work and the residents split the costs. Same thing has happened in many communities around the nation only to have the big players (especially the Cable companies) come in and shut it down.

So no, this doesn't necessarily mean goverment run; but it does mean citizen run and organized in some manner - with or without help from their municipal government.

Except in this case where the "voting with your wallet" essentially means sell your home (if you have one) and move elsewhere if you don't like the one or two options available to you; but the problem is no matter where you go you basically will only have those same kind of one or two options (with possibly the same or different entities being your options).

Typically the choice is: Cable Internet (Comcast, Cox, TWC/RoadRunner, Charter, WindStream, and may be a couple smaller players) and either DSL (AT&T, Verizon, and numerous resellers due to Title II status of copper lines over which DLS runs) or Fibre (AT&T uVerse, Verizon FiOS). And all the players mentioned try to keep community broadband services - which run either Ethernet, Fibre, or Coax to your residence themselves - from being an option by claiming "unfair competition" and "contracted rights".

So yes, in this case you actually have a bigger impact by voting in elections - municipal, county, state - than you will ever have with your wallet.