Slashdot Mirror

Bitcoin was already around, but Wikileaks didn't use it until 6 months into the blockade. Haven't read it myself, but here's a foonote from Assange's new book:

On the day of the conversation [with Eric Schmidt], Bitcoin had risen above the US dollar and reached price parity with the Euro. By early 2014 it had risen to over $1,000, before falling to $430 as other Bitcoin-derived competing crypto-currencies started to take off. WikiLeaks’ strategic investments in the currency saw more than 8,000 percent return in three years, seeing us through the extralegal US banking blockade.

Here, they are saying that it makes up the majority of public funding (as of Jan 2014 though).

GamerGate is not about harassment or women. Here is a statistical analysis of #GamerGate tweets. Here is a case of GamerGate tracking down a harasser, and Sarkeesian refusing to report him. Here is a timeline of the many grievances #GamerGate supporters have against gaming journalists. Here is the transparent, open place we track our emails to advertisers on corrupt sites. Here is a blog about the corruption. Here is a discussion of one of the scum at Gawker. Here is my earlier Slashdot comment on media bias surrounding GamerGate.

Despite the many, many articles putting the word GamerGate next to the words "misogyny", "wu", harassment" and the like there is no evidence -- No Evidence -- actually associating GamerGate with any of those things, save a very tenuous link related to how the hashtag was coined and some third party trolls who it turns out harass GamerGate supporters more than GamerGate opposers.

The state that constantly smells like swamp. Has a rep for A Florida Man. Has NONE of the factors that make real entrepreneurship work though all the scam parts of hyping things.

Honestly I can't see leaving Silicon Valley for this. I'd sooner take a gig in Asia where "real high tech" is actually manufactured, instead.

Is it generating any buzz over at r/bezels?

You can see more on this at http://www.reddit.com/r/news/c... .

Begin your research within a search engine by searching for:

tempest site:cryptome.org
tempest site:schneier.com
tempest site:slashdot.org

It's just the tip of the iceberg, though. Most TEMPEST talk on the net is heavily moderated for some reason, usually ending in people calling you a nut case for even discussing it. Yes, even in light of [some of the] NSA's spying methods.

If you want to test your mental strength in what may be earnestly exploring or a decent into madness, try the #badBIOStalk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/badbi...

It's a lonely place.

Assuming I'm reading this right:

D U O V F - Bdale Garbee
D U O V F - Russ Allbery
D U O V F - Don Armstrong
D U O V F - Keith Packard (Intel)
U D O F V - Colin Watson
U F D O V - Andreas Barth
F U D O V - Steve Langasek (Canonical)
F V O U D - Ian Jackson

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/...

D systemd
U upstart
O openrc
V sysvinit (no change)
F requires further discussion

http://www.muktware.com/2014/0...

So assuming left-to-right priority, 2 votes were for "further discussion." So it was more or less a 4-2 vote with 2 abstentions. Langasek's second choice was upstart, and Jackson's second choice was sysvinit. If they both went to the upstart side--which sounds like a quite reasonable outcome to me--we'd be looking at a 4-4 tie. If a tie-breaker is necessary to break deadlock, there is NO WAY you can call it "overwhelming."

Like I said before, 50%+1 (which this vote wasn't, even) is not my definition of "overwhelming." I dare say that most people would call that a majority (more votes than all other choices combined). This is merely a plurality, among a particularly small sample size at that.

Ich kann mit Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten sympathisieren.

Wut?? XNU comes from Mach and FreeBSD. OS X userland is totally FreeBSD. NeXTSTEP? Sounds like you're thinking about objective C, a programming language. That's not OS X.

And yes, there's a reason netflix uses BSD. The network stack is so much better than linux. Why do you think facebook is jealous too?

Turns out, bacon by itself isn't bad for you.
Dietary fat only becomes dangerous in the presence of carbs.

http://www.reddit.com/r/keto

Agree. Over here, we are constantly whining how crappy SystemD is, even though most of people have no idea what they are even talking about. The discussion is much more relaxed at /r/linux. Over there, they are already taking advantage of the new system and putting together little projects like SystemD computer wake-up alarm and analyzing how it works.

Agree. Over here, we are constantly whining how crappy SystemD is, even though most of people have no idea what they are even talking about. The discussion is much more relaxed at /r/linux. Over there, they are already taking advantage of the new system and putting together little projects like SystemD computer wake-up alarm and analyzing how it works.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheRed...

There's actually a much, MUCH simpler (and more straight-forward, "Occam's Razor") reason or explanation.

In the 1970's there were sub-field of "computer science" (***) known as "Data Entry" and "Word Processing"-- with attendant "degrees" etc.

The lion's share of women who were ostensibly in "computer science" were in fact "Data Entry Specialists" or "Word Processing Professionals", etc -- and as time went on, and especially with the obsolescence of punch-cards, and the advent of decentralized "Personal Computers" and more advanced (WYSIWYG) software made just about everyone into a data entry and/or word processing person... well those subfields (along with the courses* & degrees) petty much just "disappeared", and thus so did the women in "computer science".

The plain truth of the matter is that women were never present in large numbers in "programming" courses/degrees (nor the later "network administrators" or "database architecture" fields) -- those things simply require the kind of logical & mathematical reasoning that women generally avoid like the plague (and IMHO it is not that females COULDN'T learn those skills {albeit generally not with the ease or to the level that many males do}, but rather that they don't WANT to put in the mental effort & the kind of self-discipline that is required {those skills are really not "teachable" in the passive-learning fashion; they must be "learned" in an active, individual effort manner}... all too often among the few females who DO attempt such degrees/jobs many of them "cheat" in every way possible, either copying from or otherwise tricking/manipulating males into doing their work for them**).

*Yes, there are still some community colleges and technical schools that offer courses, and even a few that still issue degrees (associates) or certificates in "Data Entry" -- but such courses are nothing like the older ones (which were generally more about "how to operate punch card machines") -- and of course, other than certain (ridiculously bureaucratic and backwards institutions -- government & hospitals, etc -- which generally require other "certifications" {health care "coding", etc} that are no longer thought of or referred to as "computer science" {because really, duh, they aren't}) -- no one really gives a crap.

**I've worked with quite a number of women who (ostensibly) had degrees/certifications as "programmers" (or coding, technically "scripting") -- and invariably (with a tiny number of exceptions) they are WAY out of their depth -- the only way they "pass" certification tests is via massive amounts of cramming (or "cribbing") and short term rote memorization, essentially gaming the testing/certification process (not that many males don't do likewise, they do). Generally speaking whenever they encounter any problem that cannot be "solved" by copy-pasta coding/scripting, but which requires actual conceptual-abstract thinking (and algorithm development) they end up reduced to tears (literally) -- requiring one or more male colleague(s) to come along (and inevitably, one way or another) to "salvage" the project by taking over those difficult tasks, with the female switching to various other project aspects (presentation, Gantt chart updating and other assorted trivial, even "make work" aspects).

EDIT:

*** And beyond doubt the entire graph, and the "data" that it is based on is ridiculously contrived. It purports to be graphing "Computer Science Majors" -- but the plain truth is that there basically WEREN'T any such degrees (not called that) until the late 1970's, and then only at a handful of institutions "Comp Sci" departments & degrees didn't start becoming "common" until the mid to late 1980's -- prior to that all "computer science" degrees were generally "minors" attached to various other majors (Math, Business, Engineering, etc).

Don't get me wrong: safer programming languages and runtimes definitely help, especially with buffer overflows (thanks C++!), but it's one aspect of many that impact security.

it won't prevent devs from concatenating SQL with user input

You can't do this in, say Haskell, unless you write your own SQL interface library that builds solely on strings.

Granted, I lost interest in Haskell somewhere around hitting the Functor/Monad point, but if devs can send raw SQL to the database, they will do so.

misusing threading primitives

You can't do this in concurrent safe languages, like Concurrent ML, Rust and Haskell.

Yes, you can.

So basically, safety properties have importance on par with domain requirements, and must be subject to the same rigour that domain features get, ie. testing, verification, etc.

Good luck spreading that attitude. Makers of device drivers, SCADA, etc., dearly need it.

Basically, the safer the language, in the sense that the more properties can be assured at compile-time, the more features and safety properties you can verify, and the fewer security vulnerabilities.

That helps get us closer, certainty. The language and runtime can help catch/eliminate common, elementary mistakes. It's not the silver bullet though: wherever creative work is being done, therein lies the potential for new vulnerabilities.

For the vast majority of consumers, changing the PID to 0 is absolutely damaging the product.

It turns out you actually can use FTDI's own tools to reprogram the PID to a generic one. See here. So, in a sense, FTDI has already released a "fix". It is unfortunately a multi-step process, although I'm sure it won't be long before someone wraps that up in a small one-click executable. In fact, the counterfeiter could do that itself. (Although to do so would be to own up to the counterfeit, which would make them an instant target for FTDI's legal department.)

If you want to follow someone - pick Apple. Given the way news coverage is, if there's a problem with someone somewhere and their SSD in their Apple product, the whole world would know in a nanosecond. Someone as heavily scrutitinized as Apple (where even one failure in millions of computers sold would probably bring about SSD-gate) means if there is a real problem, you'd already know.

Don't be so sure about that. I and many others have had problems with the GPU soldering on 2011 Macbook Pros. This has been affecting lots of users since last year, and although there was some media coverage, I don't think it's gathering enough attention as you seem to imply it would.

Some references:

http://www.mbp2011.com/
https://twitter.com/hashtag/mb...
http://www.reddit.com/r/mbp201...

Why is custom hardware needed?

It's not. The off-the-shelf hardware they chose, combined with off-the-shelf software they chose, was quite capable of doing what he said it would.

The problem was he lied when he said it was custom hardware developed through a series of different iterations. It wasn't - it was as off-the-shelf as you can get, with only a "would you like fries with that?" ROM upgrade from 8meg to 16meg, and a lack of USB port - to differentiate it from the Alibaba $20 special. Right down to the case, which he also claimed was custom-designed by him...

(Hell, after people showed him pictures of an identical board in an identical case being sold there, he popped up saying the USB port was a 'fantastic idea' and that he'd now decided to include one too...)

The images of the hardware and development process used on the Kickstarter page? Again, deceptive - the picture of his 'custom-made' case was lifted from Alibaba and the original logo (badly) photoshopped out; images labelled as showing how ongoing development had shrunk the size of the hardware showed exactly the same photo (copied from elsewhere too) of exactly the same board simply resized to make it appear as though it was smaller , etc, etc.

Software? Very similar story. His 'custom-made code' consisted simply of a bunch of rules; the

The issue was never that he was taking a $20 box, installing Linux, and asking $50 for it. That's just capitalism. The issue was that he misrepresented what he was doing as original hardware and software development, lied blatently about it, and then when caught out doubling-down on the lies .

His Reddit AMA is a good overview of the whole thing.

Whoa there, have you actually seen any good Aquaman related material? I mean, besides some campy old cartoon from decades ago? Bulletproof, super strength, super speed, the standard suite of DC powers, along with some magical abilities, ruler of a kingdom, master of the seas...and yeah, command of marine life.

If you don't know much about Aquaman I suggest reading over this or this to understand. Aquaman kicks ass. The common kneejerk 'Aquaman sucks' thing is not accurate.

I think this article might be a direct response to the unveiling of JSONx

http://www.reddit.com/r/progra...

It was mentioned in the Reddit thread on the topic.

Everyone has different tolerances for this sort of thing but some people may be literally too terrified to play this game in VR.

Ooor.... A $450 computer vs a $400 console.

Consoles just have to render at 1080, not 1440 or the 4k you can easily pick up for your PC.
*re-reads*

For the last couple of gens it's usually been possible to get a PC that 'looked better' - but you ended up paying a whole wedge more for the privilege

I hope you know that neither console uses 1080 as a native resolution. Some games use 1080 mainly on the PS4, though they're main 900p, almost all games on the Xbox One are 792. Some get up-sampled to 1080p. But let's compare the current generation of hardware on those consoles, and what you could build with a PC. And you'll find that for ~30-80 more then a console you can build a PC that will stomp the ground flat and do 1080p without a problem.

The current gen of consoles at best were aborted messes that anyone in their right mind should never have bought.

All the major providers provide a *very* DMV like feel to them if anything goes wrong. I have spent upwards of 5 hours 'waiting' for some sort of response out of my provider. My experiences are not uncommon.

I returned a piece of equipment last year to my current provider. They acted like I had dropped trousers and blasted a big harry shit on their counter. Rude does not begin to describe how these people act. They do not have to care. They know they are the only game in town.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

What should have been a simple 'cleanup the account' refund a bit of money and maybe a perk service for the inconvenience. Has turned into a 100k lawsuit. All because about 10 people did not at any point say 'hey this is messed up let me fix it'.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/c...

1. Gentoo is not switching to systemd, either.
2. The adoption of systemd is mostly the result of political operations.

Maybe this? lol

Comcast: Most obviously abusive -- In my opinion, Comcast is apparently the most obviously abusive organization in the United States. (The financial system of the U.S. government is more abusive, in my opinion, but not as obvious.)

I've just started Comcast internet service. It took several hours of my time to get connected because of needing to avoid the dishonesty. I've been over-billed perhaps 7 times, spent hours protesting that, and my first bill is not due yet.

Comcast employees abuse Comcast. It's interesting to note that, when Comcast encourages employees to abuse customers, Comcast employees hear that as permission to also abuse Comcast. Comcast employees waste an enormous amount of time pretending to be friendly, apparently so they can get good results on surveys.

Comcast abuse discussion on Reddit -- The Comcast abuse Sub-Reddit is one place to voice complaints.

DSL Reports has information about Comcast. For example, Comcast High Speed Internet FAQ.

Reddit has many stories in other sub-reddits like this one: Comcast, without my permission and knowledge, adds services to my account and charges me extra for it.

The real internet connection speeds are much lower than the advertised speeds. Try the DSL Reports Flash Speed Test. There are other DSL Reports speed tests, also.

The Numion speed test is accurate, but requires the Java plug-in.

Most "speed tests" just show electrical connection speeds (the "line speed"), not actual data delivery speeds. They know what you want, and they lie.

Comcast: Most obviously abusive -- In my opinion, Comcast is apparently the most obviously abusive organization in the United States. (The financial system of the U.S. government is more abusive, in my opinion, but not as obvious.)

I've just started Comcast internet service. It took several hours of my time to get connected because of needing to avoid the dishonesty. I've been over-billed perhaps 7 times, spent hours protesting that, and my first bill is not due yet.

Comcast employees abuse Comcast. It's interesting to note that, when Comcast encourages employees to abuse customers, Comcast employees hear that as permission to also abuse Comcast. Comcast employees waste an enormous amount of time pretending to be friendly, apparently so they can get good results on surveys.

Comcast abuse discussion on Reddit -- The Comcast abuse Sub-Reddit is one place to voice complaints.

DSL Reports has information about Comcast. For example, Comcast High Speed Internet FAQ.

Reddit has many stories in other sub-reddits like this one: Comcast, without my permission and knowledge, adds services to my account and charges me extra for it.

The real internet connection speeds are much lower than the advertised speeds. Try the DSL Reports Flash Speed Test. There are other DSL Reports speed tests, also.

The Numion speed test is accurate, but requires the Java plug-in.

Most "speed tests" just show electrical connection speeds (the "line speed"), not actual data delivery speeds. They know what you want, and they lie.

That's going to upset some people over at r/bezels.

Firstly you need standing to bring a suit under the law, otherwise all you can do is report things and hope it makes it through the paperwork maze. Second... we HAVE. You'll notice @GGFeminist below had already reported her doxxing to the police by the time she posted about it.

Feminist writer explains domestic abuse: https://twitter.com/Eldritchlo...
--
Zoe and the GNAA paying for fake threats to her account: https://twitter.com/MaxShillin...
--
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bx...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bx...
https://medium.com/@sixthman/w...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://33.media.tumblr.com/f45...
-
https://twitter.com/GGfeminist...
https://twitter.com/milky_cand...
  http://i.imgur.com/892hZ1A.png
https://twitter.com/FabioFacch...
https://twitter.com/CodeusaSof...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://imgur.com/BNlLKcn
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku...
https://twitter.com/JakALope04...
https://twitter.com/tastenotou...
https://twitter.com/JaredBrick...
https://twitter.com/lizzyf620/...
https://twitter.com/Nero/statu...
https://twitter.com/tratowzolo...
https://forum.encyclopediadram...
http://i.imgur.com/u8835lH.png

"I am Cary Elwes, actor and author. Ask me almost anything within reason...as you wish."

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SilkR...

Since I haven't posted many sources, here is an excellent, succinct Reddit comment which will give you a whiff of why these social justice warriors don't deserve your support. They recklessly antagonise everyone spreading blatant falsehoods, and even other feminists argue against them and are slandered. This isn't about helping women, it's about aggrandising egotists.

1. 1. Work out the number of days since January 1st, 1900 (it doesn't say that explicitely, but gives tm->tm_yday + 365 * tm->tm_year). Today, that would be 41883
2. 2. Work out the md5 hash of that, which would be ffeac4e88ea3d3c65678fcd434a65f83 for today
3. 3. Truncate it to eight bytes, so ffeac4e8
4. 4. Search it on Reddit with https://www.reddit.com/search?...

That gives no result, neither does the previous day (4cb43551) or even a couple of days ago (7b6461c8), so what gives?

The backdoor applies the MD5 hash function to the value and sends a query to reddit.com. The query template is as follows: https://www.reddit.com/search?... Here MD5_hash_first8 is the value of the first 8 bytes of the MD5 hash value from the current date. The reddit.com search returns a web page containing the list of botnet C&C servers and ports published by criminals in comments to the post minecraftserverlists under the account vtnhiaovyd.

So...get Reddit to nix this query and deny the functionality to the botnet?

That isn't actually true. You *will* get sick even with positional tracking, as many people found out when the DK2 Rift was released. Just look in this thread, for example:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/oculu... Positional tracking enhances immersion and potentially presence, but it is not really a fix for motion sickness. Unfortunately many people don't understand this.

The problem is deeper - you are correct that the sensory mismatch between what you see and what your sense of balance (inner ear) and proprioception (nerve endings in your muscles relaying the position of your limbs) are telling you is what causes the problem. However, that is not really tied to the positional tracking. It is fairly easy to demonstrate - many people get sick even with full 6DOF tracking using a very expensive big bucks tracking system, walking around in a CAVE, not using an HMD at all (CAVEs are usually far less motion sickness inducing than HMDs).

Most of the nausea problems are caused by poor application design - sudden accelerations are bad, because you don't expect them (it is akin to someone pulling the rug from under you!), motions not initiated by the user are bad (again, unexpected movement!), inappropriate navigation schemes - strafing, head bobbing, "aiming with your head" (not being able to look and change direction of movement independently - as in all FPS games that use mouselook), etc. All these things cause motion sickness. No amount of tracking wizardry is going to help you there unless the design of the application is fixed - and these problems are unfortunately in almost every single demo that was released for the Rift so far, despite there being 30+ years of published research on VR available.

Then there are problems that are often ascribed to motion sickness, but are not really - headaches, dizziness, eye strain. Those are often caused by a poorly adjusted HMD. This is where Rift suffers a lot, because unless you have perfect vision and your eyes are spaced exactly the same as the Rift lenses, you will get eye strain and headache after a while due to a blurry, out of focus image. This is why commercial HMDs have both dioptric adjustment (the two pairs of replaceable lenses really aren't a solution) and interpupillar distance adjustment (the lenses or even displays themselves can be moved closer or farther apart). Another issue with the Rift-like HMDs is with scenes where the textures and jaggy, not antialiased lines cause visible "beating" (moire) against the raster of the relatively low-res display, provoking a lot of visual discomfort - this was really bad in the DK1, DK2 reduced it a bit thanks to the higher resolution and pentile display. That's why dark scenes work best with Rift, because the dark pixel raster is not that visible.

Do your test cases cover every possible object type that can be passed into every single method

I find it quite interesting that dynamically-typed languages, which must rely completely on tests, are the languages worst-suited to testing!

With a decent type system I can statically *prove* that my code satisfies certain properties, *exhaustively* test it for other properties (eg. those involving small enumerations like the booleans), then fuzz-test whatever's remaining with help from the language ( http://www.reddit.com/r/haskel... ).

In dynamic languages I get *no* static guarantees (not even syntactic checks, since importing/including files is usually a run-time operation), there's *no* way to test anything exhaustively (everything has an infinite domain; there's no way to guarantee we'll only get booleans) and the language *can't* offer me any help during testing since it has no idea what I'm trying to do.

Truth of the matter is, in the SF Bay Area, it is hard to be unemployed if you're a properly skilled tech worker, citizen, green-card holder or otherwise.

This is real humorous. One company offered a degreed Electrical Engineer $15 an hour in the SF Bay Area. I kid you not. (read the thread) This is not an isolated case, and I know of other examples. Why do people bother to get college degrees again??

This is what the H1B program has bought us folks. People with degrees working for slave wages that won't even enable them to pay back their student loans. In my book, that's going backwards. It's time to stop being fooled by the H1B folly.

AES-256 will never be able to be brute force broken.

Never.

And I don't use that word lightly.

The energy to check all the possible keys doesn't exist.

You would have to come up with a way to run the math using energy from outside our known universe.

http://www.reddit.com/r/theydi...

Well, at one key per second, it wouldn't ever find the answer, now would it? :)

What I said was, checking all the keys would require more energy than there is in the universe.

http://www.reddit.com/r/theydi...

Another gem from betelgeux

You want to see the future of Minecraft all you need to do is look at Flight Simulator.
They had a solid community building planes and terrain and with every release the graphics and flight engine got better. There was some payware but 95% was free.
In Jan 2009, citing financial pressure, the last of the design team for Flight Sim was laid off and the tasks for ongoing development were distributed throughout the rest of the company.
In Feb 2012 Microsoft Flight was released as a free to play game. All previous aircraft, terrain, instruments from previous versions were incompatible. Only a single island of Hawaii and a single aircraft was available. The flight model was simplified to make it easier on the console players. Additional areas to fly in as well as aircraft were available for purchase. Reviews from longterm sim users were unkind to say the least. It was now an arcade game - it simulated nothing and was useless as a learning tool. It was nothing the community wanted or needed.
July 2012 the game was cancelled.
Aug 2013 the XBox.com closure ended the ability to get a new copy of game.
There has been no Flight Sim available from MS since 2012. 2006 was the last actual Sim release honestly. It had been on the market since 1979.
I want to be wrong about this, but MS has a history of not understanding and not listening to it's customers.
The start button that they spent 17 years getting customers used to was removed and they are still don't seem to understand why Win8 isn't the huge success they hoped it would be. In spite of the fact that they have been told time and again that this is a major issue for many users they steadfastly refuse to correct it - promising that it might be there in the next update.
MS knows better than it's users apparently and it will do what it wants like the 800lbs gorilla they are.

That indeed could be the case. As pointed out on Reddit by gooneh ...

Minecraft is written in Java, and requires the Oracle (formerly Sun) JVM. Jokes and jabs aside, my guess is that MS wants to replace JVM with .NET under Minecraft, porting from Java to C#. All those 10-to-15 year olds playing Minecraft will be going to college and developing code in 5 or 10 years, and MS would naturally want them using their platform technology, so its a logical investment. Sadly, I would not be suprised to see support for Mac/Linux bit-rot and get dropped over a few years.

Did you check that they have her gmail password, or was it grabbed somewhere else?

Top thread on Reddit's discussion talks about that - seems like passwords in there come from all kinds of places, like Dreamhost, Blizzard, Filedropper, ...

"What type of laundry detergent is best used as a replacement for jet fuel in a 1972 Colecovision gaming console?"

I agree, it's annoying but it isn't impossible. You can side load google's apps: http://www.reddit.com/r/Androi...

[Client-side DNS blacklisting] won't protect against MITM, DPI, or other forms of attack.

What sort of man-in-the-middle attack are you referring to? Hosts protects against DNS MITM (admittedly by being one). HTTPS protects against HTTP MITM on sites that support it (such as Reddit). And Perspectives protects against HTTPS MITM.

Read them and weep: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/...

TL;DR? Essentially, KDE may end up switching to systemd. Because Gnome (and every other Linux fan-boi) does it.

There's something odd here. The grandparent asked for statically typed languages which combine OO with functional pyrogramming. The answers here mention lisp and JavaScript both of which are dynamically typed. The OP is right about what seems to be ignorant vitriol. It's probably misplaced hatred transferred over from Java via the JVM but it's almost like the Microsoft trolls woke up and were afraid. Sensible answers might include Ocaml, which doesn't do dynamic dispatch and so really isn't even attempting to deal with the Java problems that Scala deals with and F# which came later, is very much limited to use in Microsoft related systems and anyway fails to deal with a number of important type cases Scala deals with well.

A more interesting set of criticism and explanation around Scala can be found in this discussion of Ocaml vs Scala on Reddit.

NM. I found a post on Reddit that clarified it.

Wolfe contributed code to Bukkit that was GPLed but was violating Mojang's license because it wasn't licensed under the GPL or similar. Mojang just chose to otherwise ignore the violation, but then has since acquired Bukkit. As soon as Mojang made a release, they infringed on Wolfe's GPL code contribution when they didn't release the source to the bundled Mindcraft server.

Sounds to me that Wolfe's contribution wasn't covered under a valid license to begin with. That would mean that Mojang doesn't get to automatically use his code anyways, but also doesn't mean that Mojang needs to open Mindcraft up. Mojang just paid money for an incomplete product.

One of the most interesting things about this farce, besides the laughable declaration of the death of the gamer (in keeping with the general voodoo hoodoo postmodernistic dialectic that progressives, SJWs and feminists tend to believe actually works beyond the true believers) is the synchronicity of the response.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSsuc...

Make no mistake, this is an organised bloc singing not just from the same hymnsheet but from the same mailing list. My advice is push them out of all circles with as much vigour as possible.

Question, why do you (generally speaking) feel the need to lump all the people who disagree with you together into one group, give that group a sarcastic name,

I call the people involved in this scandal "Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)" principally because I refuse to insult the feminist or progressive movements by calling these people with feminists or progressives. Genuine second-wave feminists have publicly criticised their behaviour.

If you want to understand the difference, look up the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags on twitter. The Social Justice Warriors are hateful, disingenuous, at times sociopathic bigots. They are adult, internet-empowered versions of the bullies and tormentors which many gamers remember from secondary school.

Gamers are the victims here. The modus-operandi of the SJWs is to cast themselves in the cloth of underprivileged groups -- most SJWs are in fact white, upper middle class, college aged -- then proceed to level accusations of privilege, bigotry, and misogyny against just about anyone involved in gaming for even the slightest perceived infractions. A climate of fear has developed, first in the indie and later wider gaming industry as a result of the "social justice" witchhunts which these people regularly engage in. Worse, this has resulted in SJW-aligned developers and journalists rising to positions of power and being first in line for awards and increasingly development funding, with cronyism trumping competence.

For Gaming, so often a hobby of last resort for the excluded and isolated in society, this is an awful and tragic outcome. For gamers, male, female, straight, gay or trans, it is a frightening development. Their hobby, their refuge, is being taken over by bullies.

Because their rhetoric and especially actions come across as so farcically disingenuous, I don't believe for a second that SJWs actually believe in or support the causes of homosexuals or transgender people in video games. Their support for women is also largely forced, and disturbingly biased towards the conservative view of women as a weaker sex who must be protected/defended (A view consistently challenged by the games industry over the years).

My honest opinion of SJWs is that they are privileged Neo-liberals, who adopt a forced social justice persona both to project their own (increasingly obvious) bigotry onto others, and ultimately to benefit themselves socially and financially. They are disingenuous, extremist bullies, and the gaming community is under co-ordinated PR attack, and has been almost completely censored on gaming websites.

The Social Justice Warriors are right about one thing though; this is a historical moment. Whether they win or lose, the GamerGate scandal will be seen as a watershed moment in the history of online-communities, and who controls them. Two weeks ago, I would never have believed that a clique so small could all but take-over a community so large, but it is becoming clear that this is precisely what (almost?) happened to gaming. There are lessons to be learned here, unrelated to the immediate issues, and I only hope the right people will take note and heed them.