The problem is not GOG, the problem is a credit card that charges a fee based on the location of the transaction processor. The fix is to get a credit card from a reputable company.

And all of that composting material is composting because bacteria are slowly breaking it down, releasing methane in the process. So, good job reducing the greenhouse effect...

Every day, we hear people who read tabloid news reporting instead of scientific papers complaining about the lack of scientific rigour in the things that they read about climate change.

For transatlantic flights, it would be a horrible idea, but there are other routes (e.g. a lot of European short-haul flights with carriers like Ryanair and things like the 30-minute NY to Boston run) where a perch would probably be more comfortable than the existing non-reclining awful seats. Especially if they made it possible to board faster so you're spending less time in the plane...

That's technically true, but not practically true. Most software gains very little (more entropy in ASLR) from moving to using 64-bit pointers. Most software gains a lot from moving from x86-32 to x86-64 as the ISA. In particular, it gains a lot more registers (and, importantly, loses the restrictions on which instructions it can use). It gains cheap PC-relative addressing (i.e. shared libraries are a lot faster). It gains SSE2 as a baseline, so floating point operations and calling conventions are cheaper.

There's a good argument to be made for using the x32 ABI, but generally speaking x86-64 code with the 64-bit ABI will still be faster than x86-32 code using any ABI.

The value of a publicly traded company is the price of the last sale of a share multiplied by the number of shares. The price of the last share is dependent on what the person buying it thinks that they will be able to sell it for. At and IPO, a lot of people expect the demand to be high and so hope to sell it quickly before it eventually drops in value. Others expect that a newly listed company will grow. Slack is in a market that is growing and is increasingly able to convert subscribers into paying customers, so it's not unreasonable to expect them to grow quite a bit. On the other hand, their main competitor is Microsoft (Teams), and so another likely future involves them losing customers in large numbers to a product that many of their customers are already getting bundled with their Office 365 subscriptions.

You've inadvertently flagged the real problem with XMPP: It doesn't store messages server side, or it does store messages server side, depending on which protocol extensions a given implementation happens to have. For anything that you might want to do with XMPP, there are 2-10 different XEPs with varying levels of support, that describe how to do it.

XMPP badly needed a high-quality reference implementation of a server and a library for implementing clients. Instead it got two crappy reference implementations (that were so bad even the standards editor didn't recommend using them) and a load of partial implementations of the client part of the spec.

Why would one US corporation being acquired by another US corporation make any difference to the laws that apply to it?

That's not true for most carriers. If you ask for a SIM-only deal, they will sell you something a lot cheaper. Someone did the analysis of these phone-and-plane deals in the USA 4-5 years ago and found that the best ones worked out to be the equivalent to a loan with an APR of around 40%, a lot were even higher. You can almost certainly get an unsecured personal loan from your bank with better rates than you can get a phone bundle from your network provider.

It's not surprising that a lot of people are unaware of this difference though - when providers are making so much money from selling overpriced loans to people wanting to buy expensive phones, they have a great incentive to hide their good-value plans.

The fact that the people who wanted to leave had no plan and promised a large number of mutually incompatible things (e.g. access to the common market, freedom from EU regulation) and any time they are given some of the things they demand they complain that they don't have the others. Among the things that were promised in the referendum campaign:

• Membership of the common market.
• Freedom from EU regulation.
• Freedom from the European Court of Justice.
• 'The easiest trade deals in history' with numerous other countries.
• £350m/week more available to the exchequer.

If we lose regulatory alignment with the EU, then we can't have freedom of movement over the Irish border, so we're in violation of the Good Friday Agreement. Good luck conducting trade deals when you've just violated an international treaty. If we remain in the common market, we have to remain aligned with the EU for regulation and answerable to the ECJ.

The only Brexit that doesn't involve completely killing the economy (losing 44% of exports and 53% of imports) involves remaining closely aligned with the common market. This means losing our seats in the EU Parliament, Commission, and Council, but still having to follow their rules. That's practically the exact opposite of 'take back control'.

There is no set of compromises that will keep the 51% (closer to 46% now) happy because they voted for an impossible set of constraints.

There was a case on Slashdot a few years ago where someone had a camera and microphone in their porch, which they used to record the police. They were charged under wiretapping legislation. I don't know what happened to the case in the end, but if they were successfully prosecuted then I can imagine that Bezos and Pichai would be liable for a few million counts of the same.

The problem is signal to noise ratio. Consider email spam: the cost of sending spam to a million people is approximately zero. The cost of sending a thoughtful email to one person is, at the very minimum, a few minutes of real-human time. If you lower the cost of speaking sufficiently then the signal to noise ratio tends towards zero unless you actively filter.

If you're starting with -Os, then your baseline is optimising for size, so presumably that's what you care about. To beat it you need to either remove instructions entirely, replace multiple instructions with a shorter sequence, or pick instructions with shorter encodings. All of these are things that are really easy to automate. Most of the bloat comes from ABI constraints, and if you pass the right flags the compiler will ignore these (e.g. omitting the frame pointer).

If you're optimising for speed, then start with -O3. At this point the compiler has already done things like loop rotation, common subexpression elimination, and autovectorisation. You might be able to beat it, but even understanding what the code is doing for a nontrivial example is quite hard.

Are you sure? I have a version of libc++ that works in the FreeBSD kernel, but I needed to do some quite drastic surgery to remove all of the locale stuff (which I really don't want in the kernel - anything that needs localisation should be done in userspace). A lot of the standard library depends on it indirectly and so I needed a lot of stubs to even let the standard library build.

The C++ standard library could really benefit from some better modularity and layering. The core ADTs, the threading library, simple string handling, localised Unicode string handling, and so on should all be separated out and the dependencies between them made explicit. Unfortunately, the C++ standards committee is philosophically opposed to subsetting, which means that instead of a handful of standard subsets we have hundreds of per-project subsets.

Not the GP, but often airlines turn off most of the in-flight entertainment system on approach and leave it off after landing. If you'd planned on watching a film, weren't able to watch the last 30 minutes, but still had to sit in uncomfortable plane seat for that time, I can imagine that you'd be cranky.