Surely harassment doesn't suddenly become acceptable if it's done to someone you agree with (but just don't like or respect)?

Back in August, the ILT (the responsible party) had already been sending out warnings to drivers that what they were doing was illegal and that they could be fined up to EUR 4200. Source (in Dutch). If it has taken more than a month for them to actually fine anyone, I'd say they've been very lenient, at least based on the current laws.

It means 60% on that list are suspected of having terrorist ties. It does not mean they really do have terrorist ties, and it does not mean the suspicion is reasonable. In other words, that 60% would need to be further categorised before it becomes a meaningful statistic.

The 40% on the other hand is already a meaningful statistic.

True, and making a useful -Wunreachable-code option for C is easier than for C++, but it's still significantly more difficult than for Java. For one thing, C has no abnormal returns, it has regular function calls that cause an abnormal return as a side effect, and in some cases, even in well-written C code, it is difficult for the compiler to statically determine whether those functions are called. For another, C has thousands (probably even more) of programs that have already been written without taking the not-yet-existing warnings into account, and users expect a new version of the compiler to not give too many bogus warnings. In contrast, Java was able to emit a warning right from the start, and programs have been modified to take the warning into account, to re-work the code if the compiler warns, even if the warning is not correct (logically speaking; it may still be correct based on the spec).

You're right, I should have been paying more attention. The warning was (GCC) and is (clang) common to their C and their C++ modes, though, so it doesn't change much.

gcc used to have an -Wunreachable-code option, but it depended too heavily on the exact optimisations enabled, so you could never tell what it would and wouldn't warn about, so that was dropped in 4.5. gcc 4.4 and earlier were capable of warning about this. clang does still have a warning for this, with a somewhat different approach so that it should be far more reliable, and the option name is the same as what gcc used to have. It is still not reliable enough to get enabled by default, though, unfortunately.

C++ is simply a significantly more complex language than Java. This sometimes has its advantages, but it also has disadvantages, and unreachable code detection is one of the major disadvantages: there are just too many examples where the compiler can tell that code is unreachable, and optimise accordingly, but the developer won't want a warning. For a simple example, a check that a function parameter value is negative may appear in a template function, but if the parameter type is dependent, and in the only particular instantiation in the program it happens to be unsigned, then the code will clearly be unreachable, but should most likely not be removed. This is much less of a problem for Java, since Java does not have templates. It does have generics, but generics work differently, and suffer much less from this problem.

I do not know enough about the FCC investigation to comment on that part, but a cover-up attempt is definitely not what is happening. No one would have even known about this if Google had not voluntarily come forward with the information. Here is the blog post from four years ago, from Google themselves, and they did in fact work with relevant agencies in various countries to determine how to fix the mess they caused.

FTFA: "Google has admitted that its camera-equipped Street View cars inadvertently captured emails, passwords and other data from unprotected wireless networks as they drove by." The key word that should make all the difference is "inadvertently". It's up to you to choose whether you believe it (I do), but they claim they weren't looking at the private data at all, and only found out later that it had got recorded along with the data that was supposed to be recorded.

Another fun one is a password containing a backslash. To make matters worse, the customer support is not willing to reset the password, because the web site offers a way to retrieve the password already via e-mail, despite the fact that entering the exact password as it appears in the e-mail does not work. And the fact that the password can be retrieved at all (instead of only reset) is not a good sign either.

I'm only going to look if you kick up a fuss about my ability to look ;)

So instead of "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after you.", we now have "They're only after you because you're paranoid."?

That's an understandable point of view. However, like it or not, if it's become part of our culture, you won't get much sympathy for an attempt to effectively destroy it, and that most definitely isn't what copyright laws were intended for. Don't worry about your reputation, even if you're right that it's potentially damaging (which I highly doubt), you can always say "I was young and foolish." People have been saying that and getting away with it for far worse things than making a game that others still show an interest in after many years.

Yes, I am. If you've got a valid patent, and hundreds of licensees, you wouldn't be able to go after one infringer, just on the off chance that you get a crazy judge and have to pay back the licensees before you even get the chance to appeal.

No, there really shouldn't be, that would be worse than the current situation. That would mean that to go after any infringers at all would be financial Russian roulette, no matter how valid the patent may be.

Do you? Or is it simply in your best interests to do so, since they would otherwise be allowed to use force to get what they need?

If hotmail.com was sold and became a p0rn site

If I move and don't tell anyone, people who are looking for me will continue to ring the doorbell at my old address. If I want people to be able to find me, I should let them know I am going to move. But that's not the same thing. This isn't about what will be happening on the old address, but about what has already happened on the new address.