Crippleware on Windows always used to amuse me. Oh you've disabled the button because I haven't paid? [poke]...[poke]... There now it's enabled again. Oh, you forgot to check if it should be enabled when processing the click event? Tough.

Sometimes I was far more subtle. I'd start slowly cycling the background color, one RGB increment at a time...

I believe that github uses the reply email address to attribute comments. eg github sent the message to "@torvalds" and anyone who replies to it must be "@torvalds". I'm guessing both of you "Replied All" and included the same github email as recipient.

These days the most effective measure you can take is to install an ad blocker. That will prevent the vast majority of drive by installs. Second, I'd say you need to be very sceptical of freeware software installers. Using a service like Chocolatey to find and install popular utilities will help here. Third, I'd recommend installing Process Explorer as a replacement for the windows Task Manager. Get a feel for what programs are running in the background, and investigate anything you don't yet recognise particularly after installing something new.

I've always pictured some of those old testament laws as bad precedents based on one off cases. eg an individual goes around bragging about their new "blended fiber" garment. Instead of pointing out the sinfulness of their pride, ban blended fibers outright.

Kill two birds, disguise an NFC chip or similar on yourself. Use that to maintain your session, so whenever you and your computer are separated, your session and encrypted files are locked.

I'd perhaps use "+1 Underrated" for an on topic / insightful Troll....

For a mostly static site, you could try something like Nikola. Write pages in plain text with simple markup (/ markdown), then compile to static html using some number of simple templates and css.

I'd say it's the other way around. If these sites were hashing and salting passwords, these simple passwords were low hanging fruit that were easy to crack.

Train a compression algo using a spam corpus to build a dictionary. Compress and encrypt your message. Then use the spam dictionary to *decompress* it. Hey presto, your message looks exactly like a randomly generated spam message.

This is South Africa, where they already have open licensed text books covering a significant fraction of their school curriculum.

You want to embrace emoji? Here, try texting using only emoji characters (including usernames).

I'm not completely sold on the syntax, but I find the design and runtime interesting. I'd like to find an excuse to build something with it, to see if it can live up to its potential.

I started thinking about how I would design a language recently, then I came across rust, and I saw quite a lot of the same conclusions I came to myself. Abstract classes, multiple inheritance, Interfaces with versioning, combining 3rd party libraries... With rust, you define the layout of memory without inheritance, and the implementation of interfaces for types without defining the layout of memory. Neatly side-stepping some of the issues faced by other languages.

All resources and object lifetimes are managed, avoiding .NET's IDisposable. You can combine structures together, which can exist exclusively on the stack, avoiding the "everything is an object on the heap" problem that Java seems to fall into.

Since there's no NULL, there's no NullPointerException. There's no unchecked exceptions, or any exceptions at all for that matter. Though, I might prefer to have them. Sure, there's the try! macro. But that's just syntactic sugar for checking the return code of every function.

If your machine is not connected to an atomic clock, your measurement in UTC is likely to be slightly off anyway. So tweaking the rate of time passing so that every day has the same number of seconds is a reasonable compromise. I remember hearing that google do this in their data centres.

If you do have a local atomic clock, record timestamps against TAI and convert to UTC. But even there you have to deal with clock drift, though the error bar should be much smaller.

How long will it take before that virus scanner has cost the company 36 hours of lost productivity? Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. You'd be better off make sure everyone is saving files to a network drive with automatic hourly snapshots. Eg connecting via samba to a linux box running btrfs, or freebsd running zfs.