I think we should make use of the only thing that reliably works: human greed. Give all the money earned with CO_2 emission taxes to people or institutions extracting CO_2 from the atmosphere. This will start a CO_2 extraction bonanza.

Time is an averaged measure of entropy defined by man and not something which exists inherently in physics. There's no such thing like time in an entropy-free system.

Actually, there are "things" which "travel" faster than light: There is no speed limit for shadows or non-material points, e.g. the point where two scissor blades intersect when you cut something.

Hopefully, you're aware who pays the hefty price for that kind of insurance in the end? Hint: It is not the shop/bank/clinic...

Currently, we use a mixture of Rifts (CV+S) in our courses. Works, but with lots of difficulties. Mostly because the framework apparently wasn't designed for multi-user environments. Every student has to setup the system anew. We have to set a certain registry key and from time to time pull the cable to the HMD and plug it in again. So, this was already PITA. Would be interesting to hear about experiences from others in a similar situation.

To make a Facebook account mandatory renders Oculus (Quest 2, but applies also to new Rift S and CV users) unusable for us.

We'll look for other options to educate the VR developers of the future.

I work since about 1995 mostly with Java. Never heard about a payroll system or inventory management written in Java. This is all off the shelf software like SAP or Oracle stuff (which could be in Java) you simply buy or rent. No one writes his own payroll system, that makes no sense at all.

I know at least one large German electronics retailer who had wirtten the backend for their inventory and merchandise management system in Java. If you need agility in your sales processes, this makes complete sense because customizing SAP or Oracle to your needs is pretty much of a nightmare. In my opinion that was a huge advantage for them.

I'm a KDE user myself but do not share this opinion entirely. Some years ago the Kontact suite including the popular Kmail client was made unusable by a well-intended but badly designed backend. Akonadi, Nepomuk, Strigi, Baloo drove flocks of users away from Kontact and even KDE.

The "minutia" are worthless because they can easily be altered for fraud. However, it is not easy to change the overall structure of a program. The effort is similar to write the program by oneself from the start. We use professional-grade plagiarism software (throwing away "minutia") and it works very robust. The most important parameters are maximum length of identical token sequences and percentage of identical n-gram token sequences. The main difficulty is to find a balanced parametrization. A low levels of false positives leads to a high level of false negatives and vice versa. Following "in dubio pro reo", a low FP-level is prefered.

Ca. 20 code lines with freely to be written logic are required. You would be astonished of how many ways there are to solve even small programming problems.

Your obfuscator would be entirely useless against professional plagiarism programs.

spaces to tabs: whitespace usually is ignored
ctime/mtime: why should this be considered anyway?
camelcase to underscore: identifier names are ignored
change variable names: identifier names are ignored
add generic comments: comments are ignored
randomly placed returns: whitespace usually is ignored

Professional-grade plagiarism programs see
int a = b
+ 2;
as token sequence
INT INDENT ASSIGN INDENT PLUS 2 SEMICOLON

All of your obfuscations are snake oil.

Swapping code parts woul indeed challenge plagiarism programs. But, as you conceded, this is hard to implement without introducing errors.

That one's easy. 1989/1990 also marks the end of the only large-scale, competing economic system to capitalism: socialism. Before, the stakeholders of capitalism had to prove that the masses benefit from it. This restriction is gone. Unrestricted capitalism benetfis capital, not people.

From the abstract: "the thermal maximum is characterized by warming up by 3-9degreesC in winter and by 2-6degreesC in summer". So 6 degrees in prehistoric times is the relevant temperature (plus 9 degrees in winter is much less than plus 6 degrees in summer) which we surpass quickly nowadays: http://siberiantimes.com/ecolo...

As long we're not treated by intelligent roboters, this seems unavoidable. Humans will always err. If treatment of cancer and heart diseases further improves, medical errors will be (in all likelihood) number 1 cause. So this seemingly shocking news might be a sign of advancement in medicine. Just playing devil's advocate.

2014 won't keep the record for long.

How 'bout (or were functions ruled out?):

void func() {
if (AquireResource1())
func2();
}

void func2() {
if (AquireResource2())
func3();
Cleanup1();
}

void func3() {
if (AquireResource3()) {
DoStuffWithResources();
Cleanup3();
}
Cleanup2();
}

Up to now, the platform was just too... open!