What the article fails to properly address is that this is Visual Basic 4: up to this version, executables are not native code, but a weird mish-mash of precompiled tokens and resorces. Tools to reconstruct the original source code from a VB4 executable have existed for decades. Starting from VB 5, and up to 6 (the last non-.Net version) VB programs were compiled into native x86 code, a procedure that makes decompilation much (very much) harder.

It's not really "lending to gamblers", they are not giving money with the explicit purpose of it being used for gambling and such (nobody would be crazy enough to do that).

In Brazil, credit cards are used as a way of financing not only current expenses (let's say a trip, your daily shopping, etc.) but also in place of small loans (those are not very common), and used to buy appliances, pay a unexpected bill that you cannot afford with your standard income, etc. This model leads to a huge problem with unpaid credit card invoices, that is predatorily explored by financial institutions that apply sky-high interest rates for overdue bills. The issue is rather complex: you have a mix of economic disadvantage, social inequality, lack of financial education and predatory practices. The current government is trying to curb the latter, but given the general lack of economic resources for a big part of the population, and the impossibility for them to access better lines of credit, the problem is not going away any time soon.

Gambling is simply another way to spend that credit card money, and it's obviously particularly awful, but a lot of people who bought a refrigerator, a kitchen stove or an old car they need to work, are in the same situation, with interests that they cannot afford to pay back.

Well, that would not solve the problem I and (possibly many others) might have: I have a Fire Stick that I only use while traveling, since at home I have an Apple TV, a Kodi PC, and so no need for the FireStick to be permanently connected.

Unfortunately, he died in 2007.

Same for me. And I don't even have an iPhone.

...while you are at it, could you please remove the 64KB bytecode limit for a single method?

Pretty please?

And that's also the main reason why, at small scale, you can order a dozen of PCBs from China for a few dollars/euros while the corresponding product in Europe (or in the USA, but I guess it-s mainly a problem of scale) has a cost in the hundreds. Producing electronics is one of the most environmentally unfriendly processes imaginable, with a quantity of very nasty stuff as a byproduct.

That’s not (completely) correct: the Community Edition is free for: a) open source projects; b) individual developers (including commercial usage); c) organizations up to 250 PCs or US$ 1 million of revenue/year (max five seats) and it has 90% of the features of the Professional version: the missing 10% is made of features that you would only use in an enterprise setting anyway. It’s not a completely different product (like VS Code) but a cut-down version where the cut, for individua ldevelopers and smaller shops, is really no that significant.

I am a (very) casual gamer and I find it very useful: I turn my XBox Series S on maybe two or three times a month, when work takes its toll maybe even less. But when I want to play something it's there and, with games that support streaming, I don't need to waste time installing dozens of GBs just to play an hour while my dinner is cooking. For less than 150 US$ a year (the Ultimate version, that gives me the option to also install games on my PC, if I wish) it's a bargain: I could only buy a couple of games a year with that amount anyway, and I would have to commit to them and them only while, as I said: casual gamer, I like to change.

I don't know if my case is very representative of what Microsoft had in mind (probably not) but, well, it works for me.

"Guardia di Finanza" is more or less the police branch of our version of the IRS (they are a military entity and have guns, by the way) and they don't deal directly with murders and rapes. So the proper question would be "have all the high-profile white-collar fraud, embezzlement, corruption and tax-evasion cases in Italy been solved?"

Or not (from TFA):

The fact that they spent US$ 5 billion on the new doughnut- shaped office campus may also have something to do with it...

My (admittedly old) car had several free sockets due to some relays and fuses not having been installed in the factory, because the optional features they were supposed to control (e.g. heated mirrors) hadn't been bought and installed. Maybe with modern cars it's different.

Running a few times around the block also consumes energy, but since no one is going to pay for that and it's not re-usable, that energy is just, well, spent.

For a moment I just pictured an alternate version of this story where the bomb squad is called for a bag left unattended and detonates it in a flurry of scraps of two-century old paper.