The sage of Wikipedia states

The actual size and behavior of floating-point types also vary by implementation. The only guarantee is that long double is not smaller than double, which is not smaller than float. Usually, the 32-bit and 64-bit IEEE 754 binary floating-point formats are used, if supported by hardware.

So the program implementation assumed a behavior that was not guaranteed, and was burned when it used an outside library which was specification compliant but not in the same way as that particular implementation.

A poor workman blames his tools. And in this case I'm not referring to MinGW, which is admirably neutral in its reporting.

And abusive troll moderation rears its ugly head.

From TFA:

That's because the laid-off workers sued the company and won just, he says, as Mandriva was breaking even. (The details of the suits, including names of employees involved, are confidential, he told us, and he declined to offer details.)

So... not trolling at all.

Poland tries to drag us into a new cold war with Russia together with the US and the fascist Kiev coup junta.No thanks, let the poles first grow up and get over their grudges.

Hi Vladimir! Protip: wear a shirt, you're not in your 20s anymore.

Finally, proof that we are the product.
But if we are the product, can we sue for our share of the payout?

From the FTC's perspective, you're not the product, but your information is a business asset.

Your information would already go along with the business in any change of control or merger -- the privacy policy did not preclude that. And yes, your information has value in that context, just like any customer list, but you do not have any claim upon that value. You gave the business the right to use it in its business.

The FTC's perspective is that your information should not have independent value from the business as a separable asset. They're seeking to substantially enforce the promise in the privacy policy -- that the asset is tied to the business and its operations, and not freely alienable to anyone willing to pay for it.

Since only coprorations are now people and people are not people, we'll all have to form little corporations of course, in order ot get our due.

Forming a corporation won't save you from the consequences of your negotiating skills (or lack thereof).

No, I do not. People have families. People work jobs to pay for undergrad tuition. People transfer between schools. As for your "I have a right to know everything if they ask me for crowdfunding" approach - no. You have the right not to offer funds. The rest of us have the right to deem your request unreasonable given that, again, this was a baseline credential earned 20 years ago. Disclose your professional history for the past 28 years and I'll reconsider.

I wonder why it took her so long?

I wonder how this is relevant when it concerns a baseline credential earned 20 years ago and you seemingly have no issue with the MS, MA, and PhD earned from 1996-03, much less her positions at Brown and UC Boulder.

In other words, it's none of your damn business.

The point is that we don't want anyone to _have_ to use DRM.

The user does not _have_ to use DRM. The user is free to download versions of Firefox that implement the capability or not.

DRM is not a capability in the traditional sense. It's not a way for your software to do something. It's a way to prevent the user from using the software as they please, as directed by the content provider.

It certainly is a capability. It's a capability for the user who happens to be a content provider. It's a capability for users who believe that the content provider's directions are permissible. It's merely not a capability for a "once it has been created it immediately becomes mine for any purpose" user. All three stereotypes also run along a spectrum... content providers and users alike may believe that DRM associated with a subscription is fine, but not DRM that locks content to a single, specific hardware device.

You don't want anyone to be _able_ to use DRM through Firefox, whether as a producer or consumer. That's an ends-justify-the-means approach to open culture, not an "open" method of lobbying for "open culture" as a valuable norm. That's also an absolutist view since DRM would be required to impose any restriction, not simply the extreme restrictions that would offend the typical user.

Open culture cannot be said to be "open" if it cannot countenance pragmatists.

. It's a sad day for Mozilla, the w3c, the web as a whole, and open culture. At least there's still the iceweasel fork that doesn't come with this...

You say that as if it's the only option.

We also recognize that not everybody wants DRM, so we are also offering a separate Firefox download without the CDM enabled by default for those users who would rather not have the CDM downloaded to their browser on install.

I can only conclude that the issue is not that you don't want to use that capability, it's that you don't want anyone else to be able to use that capability. The contradiction in wanting "open culture" to deny some users options that they desire never crosses your mind, does it?

A true skeptic is more skeptical of things that appear to confirm their biases than of things that don't.

I doubt that.

You do realize that most Western government have donated millions of dollars to nearly every international relief effort, right? And that money comes from the taxpayers, whether they like it or not. To attempt to shame someone because they have not contributed a second time is morally unsound.

Under some very particular definitions of morality. Values of morality that I and others reject.

Friggin typos. If a fraction of the effort put into beta was put into the comment interface, I wouldn't be faced with the tri-horned dilemma of not commenting, being careless, or committing to preparing a treatise when I'm trying to make a 60 second point.

it's not a good theory, or practice, even if it did apply to everyone. we live in a society, not some dog-eat-dog nightmare-fantasy hellhole.

The sentence was not advocating the theory as a good theory... just one that would have to be equally applied to all. If the rule applies to all you have the possibility of the masses deciding that it is a bad rule - a Lockean apprach, if you will. If the rule applies only to most (those not in power), while protecting those who have wealth and/or power, you're living in a Hobbesian dytpoia already. The soverign is simply a cabal of power interests rather than a single monarch.

"i'm alright, fuck you jack" is not a sustainable ethos for any individual and certainly not for a civilisation. it's a psychopath's creed and psychopaths are at best parasitic on society if not outright destructive to it.

Now you've run completely off the rails. Of course it's a sustainable ethos, at least for historical measures of sustainability. That is the basis of countries, states, municipalities, and neighborhoods. Sure, you can build some social network to mitigate it, and there may be some charitable efforts to compat it, but reality is still still "we're alright, fuck you jack" to an astoundingly large degree.

Feel free to disprove that by donating deveral hundred dollars to Nepali relief efforts. Or any international relief effort for that matter.

Everybody wants cheaper stuff. Are you ashamed of yourself when buying a cheaper consumer article ?

I'll accept that argument the moment that I'm given the legal ability to purchase something from any nation on the planet, legally import it, and legally use it within the United States.

Instead, U.S. workers must compete against foreign workers in labor, while U.S. corporations are protected from foreign corporations (or themselves) in sales through geographically segreated licenses, import restrictions, and digital rights management schemes. If publishers are willing to sell their goods in Brataslava for 25% of US retail, we should be able to buy it for that price. If manufactures want to sell electronics to the UK at UKP-USD parity, the brits and northern irish should be able to simply buy those products out of the US.

"Nobody's going to hold you up and carry you around..." is a good theory only if it applies to all. But it most certainly does not.

Kromtech continues to market the program aggressively and participated at the Macworld conference last year and the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas.

I'm guessing Kromtech would like to continue to market in the United States, not have its representatives entangled in in hearings for violating the injunction(s) that will inevitably be sought, and not have any property that enters into or is within the U.S. seized in attempts to satisfy a default judgment against them.

But what do I know...

And his radiation detectors are going crazy. Government hasn't issued any statement so far.

Those are some impressive detectors, especially since electrical transformers are a standard part of all power distribution networks and have absolutely nothing to do with radiation.

When the electrical substation providing external power to your nuclear power reactor fails, you shut down the reactor because your principal source of constant backup power has failed. Your secondary source, generators, are not intended to allow the plant to continue to operate, but to shut down cleanly.

When a tranformer blows, your risks are fire and, if it's an old transformer, PCB contamination from the old-generation transformer oils. Certainly not radiation.