I have to say my experience is the opposite. I'm running the technical preview on much weaker hardware - first generation Core 2 duo machine with 3GB of ram, and Windows 10 is sluggish, occasionally unresponsive, and likes to grind the disk a lot for no apparent reason. I ran Windows 8 on the same hardware, and Windows 8 absolutely flew on it, even before I managed to scrounge up an extra GB of ram. Now, it's likely that the Windows 10 build is not very well optimized at this point, so it's hard to draw conclusions. But I wouldn't call the current Windows 10 release faster than Windows 7 by any means, and certainly not faster than Windows 8 which is noticeably more responsive than 7 is (shame about the UI though...).

You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.

Yeah, like anyone can actually read and understand OpenSSL. Perhaps it would get studied more if someone entered it into next year's IOCCC.

Maybe, but for better or worse, the situation today is that Ubisoft is effectively empowered to "confiscate" keys acquired through illegitimate channels in violation of whatever terms of sale or licensing agreements those keys came with.

Now, you might argue that the law should be updated to address the rights of customers buying digital products in a more even-handed way. If you did, I'd be the first to agree. But even then, it's hard to see why those rights would or should protect someone with the digital equivalent of stolen property. If you wanted to legitimise reselling keys across borders as a matter of policy then you'd probably also need an explicit change so that DRM schemes attempting to prevent cross-border trade were prohibited and anyone operating them on a commercial basis was required to honour otherwise valid keys for any sort of activation or customer support purposes.

One browser that supports multiple profiles should accomplish that just fine.

You're not a web developer are you?

In that case, perhaps it's more closely analogous to paying someone abroad to buy something cheap and ship it to you, but then complaining when your delivery arrives that you got charged the import taxes your oh-so-honest supplier didn't pay.

Sometimes things that look too good to be true really are, but usually there's a catch. Seeing a deal that good and not checking thoroughly for the catch is just asking for trouble.

EB games don't trade in digital games. They trade in physical media. And unless there is a registration code in the box then it's implicitly transferable.

Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.

Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)

> Inline specifically means "export this as a weak symbol".

Oh gee, and here I thought it meant merge basic blocks. Do you know _anything_ how C++ compilers even work??

>> I can chose between Microsoft's __inline or GCC god-awful __attribute__((always_inline)) syntax.
> Yes, but why are you trying to do that? You're fighting the optimizer and you're almost certain to lose.

You love to constantly make incorrect and incomplete assumptions.

1. I want to write ONE directive not clutter my code up with hacks PER compiler. _Why_ do standards exist ? To make everyone's live _easier_.

2. Gee, why do things like _Profiling_ exist. The *compiler* doesn't have access to *run-time* performance. The optimizer is dealing with a _subset_ of data. It doesn't know the "function temperature".

But go on keeping making excuses. You really don't have a clue.

The security services infiltrate the group, which causes the group to talk to them. That is far more valuable than just sitting round hoovering up the entire internet and trying to filter out what you're looking for, as they can actually ask for specific pieces of information which might not have been shared. It also means that even if the terrorists use ultra-mega-super-secure one time pads, for example, the intelligence is collected. With your dystopian view of intelligence work, those messages would not be readable. The rest of your issues stem from this simple ignorance of actual intelligence work - you assume mass collection is the only way to achieve results, when decades of history before and after the birth of the internet shows otherwise.

A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).

The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.

The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!

It makes sense. We can radiate individual photons for thrust if so desired. We can move individual electrons from one position in a spacecraft to another for tiny adjustments of angle and position if so desired. It seems you're going to be much more limited by your ability to precisely track your target than by your ability to make fine adjustments.

I think a much bigger problem is going to be isolating standing waves from within the shielding material from distorting its perfect rim (with a shield that big and thin, there *will* be oscillations from even the slightest thrust inputs). You need to isolate the rim from the shielding. And you also need to make sure that you can have a rim that can be coiled up for launch but uncoil to such perfection in space.

Tough task... but technically, it should be possible.