The #scummvm group also just finished it's IRC channel to Libera.chat. We just couldn't trust Freenode anymore, for good reason.

I kind of feel sorry for them. I've worked as an IT professional for small companies for my entire career so far, so I can understand the frustration that could come from rampant piracy, particularly for such a nice market company that probably doesn't have much in it's bottom line to begin with. Whilst it doesn't entirely excuse any bullying tactics they did against Reddit.. given some of the vitriol (and I'd even go so far as to say "rabid" for some comments I've seen) is so excessive that I could understand how upset it could make them.

Keeping in mind that even in the "furore" from back in February, whilst they did distribute malware in one of their packs, my recollection is that it was explicitly designed to only activate for a single specific user that had been rampantly pirating and distributing their software. I can understand how frustrated that piracy could make them, particularly if they were unable to identify the culprit any other way. Let's face it.. law enforcement agencies like the FBI (or their country's equivalent) likely wouldn't make piracy done against small companies a major priority. I'm not saying that it wasn't ill advised, but it seems like all too many people are using the instances to jump on a "let's insult them / they're the bad guys" bandwagon.

I was thinking more Seaquest DSV

According to Snopes, this is an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/autos/te...

It wouldn't work, or otherwise the DOJ would have set up an automated cloning of the phone and trying 10 password attempts at a time. What I've gathered from reading the various articles is that each IPhone has it's decryption key stored in hardware, with no way to copy it. Easily, that is, I suppose they could break open the chip and try and chart the pathways using a scanning tunneling microscope, but that would take a great deal of effort, and it would be easy to accidentally destroy the key doing so.

So what they're trying to do is get Apple to create a signed version of IOS which when installed, won't wipe the phone after 10 failed password attempts. They obviously have a way to install new versions of IOS even without a user entering a password. Which is actually sensible, if you think about it.. when an IPhone accidentally gets bricked when an update fails (or deliberately, witness the recent "Error 53"), it makes sense for there to be a way to force reload a fresh version from scratch without destroying the user's phone. The only reaason the DOJ needs Apple's help is, likely, that there's protection in place on IPhones to prevent unsigned code from being installed. Hence they want Apple to create the "poisoned" version of IOS that, when installed, makes doing a brute-force cracking of the phone easier.

I haven't RTFA yet, but If the analysis is solely based on network delays, then a VPN company could simply introduce randomized delays to all it's users, even the local ones. Then an analysing service wouldn't be able to definitively say whether any given user is geo-spoofing or not. The best they could say is that the connecting service is likely a VPN.

It's an unfortunate sign of the times, but I've read far too many articles about people being arrested and jailed for unknowingly violating the technicalities of various different laws.. consenting partners under 18 being jailed as sex offenders and being listed for life, insulting heads of state or reporting on human rights abuses, jailed for having cartoon porn / weird tentacle thing stuff from Japan that still gets branded as child pornography, or even for whistle-blowing. And particularly for America, reading in recent times, the attitude of border agents that they're outside the law and no-one has any constitutional rights.. frankly, if you are a journalist reporting about things your government (either American or elsewhere) are doing, you'd be a fool not to have everything strongly encrypted, and give them the leisure to browse through your stuff to find something to charge you with.

Yes. "Software Patents".

I also chuckled at the classic literary reference in the article title.. "from the mice-of-nimh dept" :)

Ah. That makes sense. So yes, it's history repeating itself all over again. :P.

Even from reading TFA, I'm not sure I understand.. I take it that that version of Windows 10 comes with Bing hardcoded, but only for Internet Explorer (or whatever it is that they're calling the Windows 10 replacement)? I presume there's still nothing stopping users, once they get it, from installing Chrome or Firefox, and choosing whatever search engine they want?

Some cases I've used them for that I didn't feel dirty about are:
* checking for failure conditions from calls to sub-methods, and jumping to a common cleanup and exit code block. Difficult to replicate cleanly without massive if blocks, or abusing exceptions.
* Cleanly breaking out of multiple nested loops
* I've used them for an implementation of coroutines, which simulates threading for systems which don't have threads. In this case the GOTOs were nested inside macros and stub classes for holding context, but the whole scheme wouldn't have worked without them.

Amen to that. It's like the old argument of the GOTO keyword. Sure it can easily be abused. But for certain limited cases, it's a godsend for making clean code. As the OP says, if someone's a bad programmer, they're going to write bad code no matter what language is used. Straight-jacketing people as to what they can use may help newbies, but you end up constraining what experienced programmers can do.

Wouldn't be possible. Believe it or not, Lego bricks are produced with a high degree of precision, with tolerances less than 10 micro-metres in order to be able to have the pieces 'snap' together properly (see the Wikipedia Lego article). Currently available 3D printers simply can't do that degree of accuracy. Don't know about these new "faster" printers, but I'd suspect that they've concentrated more on "fast" than "precise".
 

What I would have loved to see in C would be a different keyword for break for exiting a loop versus ending a switch case. 90% of the times in recent years that I've been tempted to use goto have been when I've written a switch statement in a loop, and need to break out of the loop from one of the cases. I have to steel myself and either rewrite the particular case as an if statement before the switch (nasty), or fiddle around with flags to break out of the loop after the switch statement, or check it as part of the loop condition.