And as a general rule given a correctly exposed scene (no sensor saturation) darker things are harder than lighter things. To judge 3D shapes from a 2D image we (both humans and computers) rely on the fact that surfaces at different angles to the light source have different apparent shades but the darker the object is the less light will be reflected and therefore the smaller your "signal" (difference in the light reflected by points on the object at different angles) is.

Was it really only "a few years" or are you forgetting how long it has been (easy to do)? was this machine a fully functional workstation (including stuff like web browsers and if so which web browser)? or was it just a toy/special purpose box?

A few years ago gcc itself switched from C to C++ https://lwn.net/Articles/54245... . Both of the two main web rendering engines (geko and webkit) are C++. One of the two main desktop widget sets is C++.

I agree C++ has it's problems, templates look good in microbenchmarks but can easilly blow up code size. Memory requirements for linking large C++ projects can be horrific but the fact remains C++ is far more widely used and supported than any other object-orientated native-compiled language. It's position may not be quite as important as C but it's not far off.

I can see a few ways informatoin could leak in a dual stack situation involving a VPN that would not happen if everything was IPv4 only

1: The users local connectivity is dual stack (or v6 only) but the VPN is IPv4 only. The result is IPv4 goes via the VPN but IPv6 doesn't. The user thinks the VPN is hiding the origin of their traffic but it isn't hiding the origin of all of it. With a bit of extra work it may also be possible for a website or an attacker in the network to tie the direct v6 address(es) to the VPN v4 address.
2: IPv6 traffic does go via the VPN but addresses are generated in such a way that the users MAC address is revealed (for example the user has a network behind the VPN and that network uses MAC based IP autoconfiguration). This MAC address can later be tied
3: The machine has an IPv6 address from the local ISP. Even if routing tables or firewall configurations are such that this address won't be used for making connections an application could still mistakenly send it as part of a payload. The same could in principle happen with IPv4 but it's much less likely due to pervasive use of NAT.

That's the problem. That isn't an easy question to answer.

What does "associated with commerical activities" mean? does running adverts or having a donate button to help pay for hosting count? does posting links to your activities on commercial sites that runs adverts like youtube, facebook and twitter count even if none of the money from those adverts comes to me? does saying you are looking for work on a blog count?

If something like this goes through expect broad interpretations of "commerical" to be used as a stick if someone doesn't like you and/or wants to take over your domain.

It seems far moe likely to me it was rockstar/take 2's own doing. The release plan they went for means the hardcore fans will have ended up buying the game THREE TIMES.

No, java is something that people want/need which is supplied with bundled crapware that you have to remember to opt out of.

What TFA doesn't make clear is whether this new yahoo thing will be instead of the ask toolbar bundling or in addition to it.

What if your source for this claim? Searching for "opt out illegal" doesn't seem to turn up anything relavent.

It's perfectly possible technically.

Your carrier can easilly find out what sites you are connecting to and what IPs/ports you are using to do it (and if they are using CGN how those IP/port combinations may through their nat). They can easilly pass that information on to the site operator. For unencrypted protocols they can trivilly inject additional headers. For encrypted protocols they can't inject headers as easilly but they could easilly arrange with the site owner to pass the information over another channel.

Your only real defense is to use a VPN to hide the details of the mobile carrier from the target site and vice-versa. Yes this does mean additional cost and likely performance degredation.

Accelerated aging tests are far from perfect. So in a fast changing buisness there will always be the risk of a flaw that slips past testing but becomes apparent once the product has been out in the wild for a while.

No theres three

WD/HGST
Samsung/Seagate
Toshiba

When WD bought out hitatchi's HDD buisness (which got renamed to HGST in the process) the regulators wouldn't allow them to keep the 3.5 inch drive part of the buisness as that would reduce the number of players to two. So that part of the buisness was sold to Toshiba (who already made 2.5 inch drives). http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

I would also note that having the same corporate overlord does not nessacerally imply having the same quality or lack thereof.

You got that backwards, Seagate bought samsung's HDD buisness.

Programmers use it because the programming environments they work in use it. Notably Windows, .net and Java.

I wouldn't call it stupid. It was a way to add support for more characters to existing 16 bit unicode systems with minimal breakage.

Dunno what it's like in other places but here in the UK (which the OP mentioned) vehicles over a certain age (think it's 40 years now, it used to be 25, then for a long time the date was frozen) are counted as "historic vehicles" and don't pay any road tax at all. Afaict most ex-military vehicles run by enthusiasts fall into that category.

That should have said

Even the simplified formula of "leap year every 4 years" works for 1901 to 2099 which is from before the introduction of computers to beyond what most system designers would consider to be a reasonable system life.

Leap years and leap seconds are handled very differently.

The rules for leap years are according to a forumula that has been fixed for hundreds of years. Computers typically handle them as part of their conversion from internal "time elapsed since epoch" data formats to "human" date formats and otherwise don't care much about them. Even the simplified formula of "leap year every 4 years"

Leap seconds OTOH cannot be predicted in advance so you cannot realiablly convert "time elapsed since epoch including leap seconds" to "time elapsed since epoch excluding leap seconds" or "human datetime" for future datetimes and to do it for past datetimes requires an up to date list of leap seconds.

Then there is the problem that "time elapsed since epoch excluding leap seconds" which is a common way to represent time (presumablly due to the difficulty in converting "time elapsed since the epoch including leap seconds" to "human datetime" simply cannot correctly represent the times arround a leap second.

The testcase is also anything but simple, to test the code you have to inject fake leap seconds, but for a correct test leap seconds can only be injected at specific times (NTP for example increases it's update rate around possible leap seconds) so either you can only run the test at specific times or your entire test environment needs to run on "fake time". This is a big problem if your tests need to interact with a system outside the test environment in a way that depends on time within the test environment being in sync with time outside the test environment.

but then if you are working in integer space (signed or unsigned) then you can't really approach at all.for the idea of "approach" to make sense you need to be working in a space (e.g. the rational numbers) where you can get arbiterally close to something without getting there.