Depending on which European country it's not necessarily forbidden. "Compliance reasons" may also mean "the company must pay overtime at the appropriate rate" and they just don't want to deal with that.
I did the same for C++. I hate many aspects of the language, and it feels really ugly compared to newer languages like C#, or even D, but it's still my language of choice for some projects (mostly because the tools are mature and almost everywhere).
The GPU doesn't execute Javascript. It runs small programs called "shaders", written in GLSL (the OpenGL shading language), which are compiled on the fly by the graphics driver to something that can be actually executed on the GPU.
I think a valid, although not legal, motivation for that could be "I just want something Microsoft will activate because I want a clean (i.e.: without applying a random crack from the Internet which could install malware) Windows install, at the minimum possible cost".
Giving a browser plugin the ability to run any program on the user machine without any kind of validation or prompting is so stupid/evil that they deserve the worst PR backlash they can get.
Also, that's probably the quickest way to get them to release a fix.
In fact, the concept of "freestanding implementation" (as opposed to "hosted implementation", which is a implementation of the full standard) exists in C, and is sometimes used in embedded systems:
a conforming freestanding implementation is only required
to provide certain library facilities: those in <float.h>,
<limits.h>, <stdarg.h>, and <stddef.h>; since AMD1, also
those in <iso646.h>; since C99, also those in <stdbool.h>
and <stdint.h>; and since C11, also those in <stdalign.h>
and <stdnoreturn.h>
Six months of unemployment per year of employment? Where are these figures from?
For unjustified firing, the employer has to pay 33 days of salary for each worked year (was 45 before the recent labor law reform)[1]
Not even the unemployment subsidy, which is given by the social security and paid for workers with taxes on their monthly pay, is that big (4 months for the first year, and 2 months more every 6 additional months worked, with a limit of 24 months).
Yes, in control flow hijacking exploits like these ones, you make a given process execute external code (typically a shellcode, i.e. a small piece of code which launches a shell). Any code executed this way runs with the UID of the original process, so a setuid root program is needed to get a root shell.
> For doing data compression has anyone ever heard about using these techniques to generate other things besides 3D game levels?
These techniques are routinely used in the demoscene for making 4Kb/64Kb intros. In this kind of intros almost everything is generated procedurally, not only meshes, but also textures and sound.
If you are interested you can watch one of these examples:
Why should we go for "fairness" when hunting for food? Using our brains isn't fair? Animals won't show any restraint when using their strengths to kill any weaker prey.
I don't think it's sarcasm (well, I'm not too sure about the colors part). Pretty much every non-alphanumeric symbol has more than one meaning in a language like C++, which (IMHO) makes reading code slower than it could be. For instance, I would really like to have a proper arrow operator instead of "->" for C++ which wouldn't match visually with a "<" placed before in the same line.