As one who has scratched out a few purpose-built minecraft mods over the past few years, maybe I can clear it up a bit.

It's a multi-step process. The initial de-compilation step is, indeed, just about as useless as you say: lots of net.minecraft.cx.func_11235_a()

But there's a project called MCP Toolkit, which basically goes through every new release and reverse-engineers as much of it as they can (usually a pretty good percentage too), mapping the obfuscated classes, variables and methods to names which, while possibly (probably) not the names used internally, are at least meaningful.

Minecraft Forge, the officially unofficial mod API, used to include MCPing the minecraft source as part of setting up its workspace. It was really handy when I was learning, being able to trace things back through the code to figure out how they worked, but had its downside. I'm not sure whether they got tired of people needlessly making coremods (mods that altered the "vanilla" classes, as opposed to interacting through Forge), or they were afraid of drawing an evil eye from Mojang, or what, but they've altered their whole setup starting late in 1.6.4 so they don't even download the vanilla jar anymore.

More often, I used mischief to get myself into technology...

The delicious irony of the modern feminism.

No, you argued one of her critics' points against her: a series of poorly-researched and inflammatory rant-videos accomplishes precisely dick other than to serve as a rallying point for similarly-aligned identity politics, who recursively make their own poorly-researched and inflammatory rants, feeding the current paradigm: a loud, incestuous echo-chamber on one side, convinced that their MO of using shame tactics to make other people do things their way, might someday work, if they can just reach that elusive critical mass of obnoxiousness; until then, they'll keep beating on the status quo like wind against a mountain that (rightly) doesn't give a shit.

The whole approach of Anita et al is fundamentally contradictory: you don't demonstrate "equality" or "agency" by demanding that other people do for you, rather than doing yourself.

Not at all. My first foray into ebooks was way back on an old Sony Clie back in the PalmOS days.

Like freedom, of course. What are you, new here?

One example: Lara Croft. Originally, she was oversexualized, a sign of an inherently female-hostile game industry. Then, later, when later games toned down her sexuality, that was female-hostile because it apparently meant that the game makers felt that, in order to be taken seriously, a female protagonist has to be more "mannish."

She set out from the startup to make videos bitching and moaning and trying to shame others into doing things her way, rather than doing anything herself. Her intentions were ignoble from t=0.

Check out Thunderf00t's response video, for starters. There are many others.

Have you actually managed to sit through any of her inane dribblings that pass as videos? Plenty of evidence there.

Hell, just the fact that she took a 150k kickstarter and used it to make a video series full of self-contradictory bitching and bullshit accusations rather than, say, making a game that she claims everyone wants (and 150k is plenty to make a good indie game these days, don't let the blockbuster budgets fool you).

It's safe to assert that "intending to shame others into doing things your way" falls safely inside the boundaries of "emotionally manipulative."

The "liar" part is trivially proven, but plenty of others have already gone after that, so finding them will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Having done my stint in various online games, I've probably received more death threats than senators have received blowjobs from congressional pages.

I'm pretty confident in my current system, which is something of an inversion of the USPTO policy: When you add "over the internet" to the description of the threat, its credibility drops 99%.

I think 40+ years of militarization and the "us vs them", "thin blue line" bullshit attitude have made plenty of headway in that regard already, so it's no great loss considering the trade-off.

That's also assuming that they're using one of the Netflix "Blessed" OSes and/or devices.

I'm in ur base, strip serchin' ur cheezburgers?

It amuses me greatly that both replies to this post responded as if Bill was talking about "X" the windowing system rather than a placeholder variable.

Should've used $X. ;)

If you're going to get pedantic about statistics, you should really get to know your friendly neighborhood Margin of Error. Often ignored in fluff pieces, being aware of his existence is still vital.

I wasn't speaking about the copyright issue. The question was "how were they reconstructed without the video?"