Derpdiherp

Very addictive! Reminds me almost of a reversed minesweeper.

Haha I remember that southpark episode. I think relying on cameras and law to stop vandalism and theft is a little naive though. Perhaps you've never owned a motorbike but being an owner of one I can tell you it happens much more often than you'd think. If there's money to be made or 'fun' to be had there's a low life doing or considering how to do it.

I'm still not convinced by delivery by drone. There's many problems that have yet to be solved, some have obvious solutions that are still none trivial to implement - others at least in my mind are very much an issue.

So far as none trivial but solvable problems - there's going to have to be communication with all vendors operating delivery drones. Each drone will have to be aware of other drones by other companies and their flight-paths in the area and avoid collisions.

The biggest problem that I can see is the customer and public themselves. What is to stop someone stealing drones? Or plain vandalism of them? Follow it in a car to it's destination and you know it's going to have to come low enough down for a quick grab. Otherwise if there's some controlled drop off point, air rifles or crossbows or other publicly available small projectile weapons.

This is great. Something that I'm sure I and many other developers suffer from when it comes to projects at home is "it's not done yet" syndrome, usually to the point where it's never done and gets abandoned.

I think I personally could do with doing something like this in my free time.

Bit of a strawman on googling for results - sure I'm not suggesting you can hide the fact it's a relative of C, but I know when I first started out every question I would ask the almighty google oracle would be appended with "C++" - "Why is my code crap C++" - so usually you'd get an actual C++ style solution.

And so far as google and streams, well that's their opinion and fits into their particular style. There's plenty of dev houses that would tell you to avoid C style string manipulation due to the dangers of stack overflows etc.

Anyway I'm not wanting to fall into a C vs C++ argument, I'm merely pointing out that it's very possible for someone to pick up C++ without having the slightest bit of knowledge of C to begin with. I sure didn't know any C to start with.

References in my opinion should actually be called "Address of" operators, then it's much easier for someone new to see why pointers and references exist together.

Printf and the cstdlib - eh yeah I'll hand you that, if someone had no concept at all that a language called C existed prior to C++ this would be confusing without explaining it to them. But a newbie should not be looking at C++ code that uses the cstdlib or printf anyway, they should be looking at streams and true C++ code to begin with.

Is it just me or are these bounties really low. Unless I'm misunderstanding identification bypass could be incredibly damaging for the company and their customers, but it's only got a $3000 reward?

In my personal opinion you want to balance bounties against how much money that the person could receive using the exploits, vs the amount of trouble they could potentially get into.

Of course - the war on drugs itself is a failure and the morals and reasoning behind it is suspect at best, if not downright wrong.

And you only have to look at Russia to see what happens when supply completely dwindles to addicts of hard drugs, the krokodil epidemic is truly horrifying.

My point is just that a free for all on all drugs no matter what harm they cause could be disastrous for society as a whole, as you mention there are plenty of people that currently use alcohol to escape their problems that are in difficult places, especially in poorer demographics. Imagine if they could get hold of heroine or methamphetamines on a whim.

It's a fine balance and I personally cannot see a good way to strike one that will keep everybody safe and happy.

There are plenty of drugs which if used responsibly I could see being legal though, marijuana, ecstasy and some hallucinogens to name a few. If taxed the government could stand to make a lot of money from them as well.

You must take the harm that these drugs can cause into consideration when you say that you want to legalize them all - it is unfortunately not that black and white.

Heroine is a prime example. Whilst the argument could be given for "Educated use" you must take into account that the greater population at large will not educate themselves, and will come to harm - mainly through addiction.

Cigarettes are a nice example. We spend vast quantities of money on health care for people who smoke - the information is there, everybody knows that it causes cancer, yet huge amounts of people do it. We would be better off as a planet if everyone just stopped.

Whilst incarceration clearly is not the correct response to addicts, some form of regulation is needed to protect idiots from themselves.

Doesn't work on Firefox 30.0 on Ubuntu. Blink worked though.

If this is interesting to you, another topic to look into is corewars evolvers. A very similar concept, and the results from the programs that are generated are pretty amazing.

http://www.corewar.co.uk/thorsell/paper.htm#_Toc466352756

Ah I didn't think of the OS, that's a good point!

I don't think there's many situations where you'd have to abbreviate Firefox anyway, it's not a large word to begin with. Internet Explorer as IE I can understand, it's large and compounding it is useful - but we don't abbreviate Opera or Chrome?

There is some interesting behaviour so far as cat communication with humans. Cats will not meow to other cats unless it's a kitten / mother situation. Meowing with humans is pretty unique.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_communication#Meow

I think this is a good point. F.E.A.R did this amazingly well in the first instalment, and the way that the enemies worked with cohesive group strategies was pretty ground breaking for the time.

I think this title could benefit from something similar. It's a fine line to walk though, they have to be different enough to not just be a rehash.

I've been on the alternative last.fm beta streaming player for a while. The alternative is using their recommendations and scrobbler for youtube hosted content. This version is not shutting down. It could use a little curation, but overall I haven't minded the switch so much.

I can kind of see it, touring on my motorbike I'd use one of these for charging whilst camping. Unfortunately I just can't justify that price tag.

Yes, here in the UK we have adverts before the movie, and messages that say "You may not record with any device", or something to that effect.

Possibly, although I have never been given a WPS enabled device from an ISP, nor have any of my family ( have to love being tech support ). Come to think of it though I have seen routers in the past with what can only be randomly generated passphrases though, which is a step in the right direction at least. My current router was not one of those though.

Interesting, but it still relies on the default username and password on the router. I think this points at a glaring hole in router security, why aren't password and username changes forced on the first bootup of the device? Having the password as "changeme" is not good enough for your everyday user, they are very unlikely to ever use them without being forced so will plain not know they are meant to at all.

Programmer art at it's finest. I think the idea is functionality over presentation though, just look at the sites most GNU projects are hosted on.

This gives me an interesting thought, in the story all lower levels of the simulation are identical copies from the top level, in every way. The first time that they create the black ball the top level universe will diverge from the rest (they will look behind and there will be no ball) at this point there will be no more perfect copies of the original universe.

Also I wonder about the ethical connotations of turning off the machine as was suggested at the end. At what point is life "life". If the simulated beings are truly perfect, would turning it off be the largest genocide ever committed?

Useful article. But the background of the blog flickers rather badly, it's pretty migraine inducing.

I use Steam on Debian stable and it works absolutely fine, I've never had an issue with it. The games run great too.

Didn't they say the same thing about iMacs? Can't comment though, I personally don't run an AV on linux.

Best of it is - less tech-savvy criminals that didn't know about the possibility of printing gun parts before in the UK? Will sure as hell know about doing it now. Nice work BBC and the old bill.

Indeed, back when I used to develop on a Windows box I swore by f.lux. I was very disappointed when I discovered the state of their Linux version after making the switch. Redshift is definitely the best alternative.

Completely agreed - working in areas that I do char* style strings are still commonplace, and that does make you appreciate boost or std::string a great deal more. But it does not hold a candle to the ease of string manipulation in a lot of scripting languages.

  for(const auto &i : data) {
    ofile << i << std::endl;
  }

The for loop definition there with the auto keyword. The rest has been standard for donkeys years.

It's proportional to the size and complexity of the code base really. Precompiled headers help.