bitbiter

Respectable journalism calls this an "editorial stance".

The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.

Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.

Electronic gambling machines are highly regulated because they deal with real money and random number generation. There are a lot of safeguards in that industry across various jurisdictions that seem like they should apply to electronic voting machines too.

Independent testing laboratories exist that do specialize in the specific skills you're talking about. Pretty much all of the software involved is certified and saved, source is saved, compiled binaries are saved, hashes are logged of the compiled binaries. Binaries run from EPROMS or write-protected partitions making it very difficult to change them once installed. Cabinets have tamper-apparent sealing.

The machines are designed so that an auditor can inspect a machine on a casino floor in under 5 minutes, verifying that the software that's installed is the one that's supposed to be and that the physical seals haven't been broken.

I'd imagine there are a lot of similar processes for ATMs.

Steam dropped support for Windows XP and Windows Vista at the same time, about 5 years after Microsoft ended support for Windows XP and 2 years after support ended for Windows Vista

> Video calls?

Microsoft NetMeeting[0] was released in 1996 and actually included with Windows 95 through Vista

> USB thumb drives? Windows 98 didn't have drivers for them, so they came bundles with CD with drivers?

Zip drives and/or CD-RW were pretty widespread by then, filling a similar role

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting

The Nexus One had preinstalled apps that could not be removed, specifically Amazon MP3, Twitter, and Facebook.

From the docs: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/insert.html#i_%3CEsc%3...

End insert or Replace mode, go back to Normal mode. Finish abbreviation.

Note: If your <Esc> key is hard to hit on your keyboard, train yourself to use CTRL-[.

Vulcan, DirectX 12, and Metal are basically like C. They're made to be as low level as possible while maintaining hardware portability.

With the PS4 hardware is locked so their API is more like assembly (or maybe inline assembly in a C program) where you're doing specific hardware operations.

They also provide a second graphics API that wraps that one, working basically at the same level as Direct3D 11 or OpenGL.

This article might be of interest: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-inside-play...

C++ has std::valarray that has aliasing rules similar to the restrict keyword, allowing the same types of optimizations.

Unfortunately the only C++ comparison is with g++, which makes me wonder how much we're actually benchmarking the llvm backend versus the gcc backend.

Perhaps even more interesting is how gcc C consistently outperforms g++ C++ (and Rust, for that matter).

From their main page[1]:

> Does Privacy Badger contain a "black list" of blocked sites?

> No, unlike other blocking tools like AdBlock Plus, we have not made decisions about which sites to block, but rather about which behavior is objectionable. Domains will only be blocked or screened if the Privacy Badger code inside your browser actually observes the domain collecting unique identifiers after it was sent a Do Not Track message. Privacy Badger does contain a whitelist of some sites that are known to provide essential third party resources; those sites show up as yellow and have their cookies blocked rather than being blocked entirely. This is a compromise with practicality, and in the long term we hope to phase out the whitelist as these third parties begin to explicitly commit to respecting Do Not Track.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

You make a good point, but there is a faint odor of survivorship bias in "we all came out OK".

Thunderbird is "done".

Mozilla's development efforts are limited to security and maintenance updates.

I am unique among the millions so far.

It took me a moment to realize that means I am completely trackable.

A little surprising since I just built this computer from scratch a couple weeks ago. I'll take this more as a commentary on the popularity of Windows 8 more than anything.

The obvious problem with the multiple return paradigm is that Go returns:

result AND error

whereas it would make much more sense to return:

result OR error

After all, if the error is true the result is invalid. This is one thing exceptions basically gets right. Go, much like the errno paradigm, relies on the programmer's diligence to know when it is safe to use the result. A better designed language takes away the option of accidentally doing something wrong.

Besides exceptions, this better approach can be accomplished by returning a union type variable that knows its current type (languages outside the C lineage call this sum types or tagged unions).

  var foo = Bar();
  if( typeof(foo) == Error ) {
    // handle error
  }
  else {
    // result is safe to use
  }

Isn't this really just an ad homeniem?

Would the author have the same reaction if it was made by Brewster Kahle, founder of the non-profit Internet Archive (www.archive.org)?

After all, the same points can easily be made in regard to non-profit information archiving as for profit-seeking information indexing.