Good question, but the answer is that it does matter. I'm actually a huge fan of Python, but I can indeed see a big advantage in having some element of provability in the language chosen, and I do have some concerns about my favorite language being used for this. Python is a pragmatic, readable language but it isn't a great one for provability.

To address your insightful point: You don't have to trust the compiler. The SEC wants source code to be given. Since you can run the source code on any correct compiler, including one you yourself just wrote, and expect to get the same result, there's no way to exploit it through that.

The unraised point is that you can, in fact, exploit the program code this way. Given innocuous code that in certain situations--some of which may be intentional on the part of the author of the code, some of which may not be--you can get surprising and highly lucrative corner cases. A clever coder can create these intentionally; a bad one can do it unintentionally, and either way it can be hard to spot.

I think the answer to the latter issue is "unit tests". A third party can write tests for a bunch of inputs, run it through your code and make sure your code produces the expected outputs. Discover bugs and backdoors this way, and report them to the code author or SEC, whichever is appropriate.

Nowadays there's a standard bargain in place that should make it easier to get something like this through.

The school administrators will give the students gaming machines, and in return will get to look at the students naked.

The DS comes with a camera, so there should be no problems pitching this problem to school perverts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hadministrators.

Yes.

Sure. As soon as they do that, they'll be blocked. Google is "in" China because Google is physically in China, where:

1. They are given special access to get through the Great Firewall, and
2. China can prosecute Google employees if Google doesn't comply with local laws

Google physically shutting down offices means China no longer has leverage over actual human beings working there. So they'll use the only other leverage they have: the Firewall. Expect google.cn to be accessible everywhere but in .cn.

At this point, only the pirates can play the game. They just need to make a list of everyone still playing, and start sending out some local law enforcement. Once all the pirates are in jail, they can disable all DRM everywhere forever. Hooray Ubisoft for making DRM unnecessary!

Who cares about the motivations? "Altruistic" behavior always has motivations, they're just more complex motivations than for "selfish" behavior. Let Google take credit for what they're doing, they're doing the right thing today.

. . . when humans do.

While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.

You know, as the parent, and the article said, if a project is in trouble because of two layoffs, then that project must have been in trouble before they were laid off too. And you can quote me on that.

Then stop doing it. DRM has a development and/or licensing cost associated with it. If using is the same as not using it, then don't use it, and you'll save that money. It's very simple to do a value proposition when the value is zero.

I dunno, kinda seems like you didn't read the article. It leads with "The number one need of any human is to be liked by other humans", and keeps that chord going throughout. A person who is rejected and has no friends is unhappy, whether he's bullied or not, and the focus in the article is rightly on that issue.

If you focus on that part of the message, you see that there is indeed a problem that originates in the suffering child. You can't divide the world into "bullies" and "non-bullies" any more. It's "those who reject him" and "those who don't reject him", and for the kid suffering with no friends, nearly everyone is in the second group. The normative behavior is to reject as alien those who do not respond to social cues. Will you blame the whole world for behaving normally, or try to teach the suffering kid how to break through the perception barrier and get accepted?

Regarding bullies: of course the bully's behavior is non-normative, and needs correction, but that's really the lesser part of the suffering of the lonely child. The greater part is the inability to make friends.

If the thing is done, the actor doesn't have to do anything additional. It doesn't have to be done again, or done more. The only possible change is to undo it. Those who wish to undo it must justify undoing it, because they are the only ones who have need of an affirmative action to be taken.

Huginn and Muninn. I assume they're saving that for some sort of autonomous flying robot system that uses a pair of them to confuse enemy anti-autonomous-aircraft systems.

If you hate the redirects (and I sure do.. copying URLs is the best), then push for HTML5. Specifically this feature: the ping attribute.

It takes what Google (and many, many another site) is doing and makes it possible to implement the ping separately from the target URL. Seems trivial; could make a huge difference.

Of course, the danger is that it gives extension authors an easy target. It's much easier to develop a privacy-enhancing extension that filters out all ping attributes, than it is to perform the same service on a single URL which conflates the ping with the target.

We'll see; I hold out high hopes for it.

> I think the message in Avatar is a good message to be repeated. Too much of the world operates on the ideas of justice being the will of the stronger and history being written by the victor.

The blue people won. (Whoops, spoiler alert! Haha just kidding, you already knew that anyway.) I think this movie shows their biased viewpoint. James Cameron, quit trying to rewrite history.

I don't read Chinese, and I'm not about to download that--but is the point supposed to be that pirating windows is illegal and repainting Ubuntu is not?

Here's the thing: based on the screenshots, it's virtually certain that they used the copyrighted graphics that come with Windows to make this. Depending on how thorough they are, they may have used a fair amount of copyrighted text, as well.

As such, they are still "pirates". Why not just keep pirating Windows? What does this accomplish for them, exactly?