Ugh, trust MS to fuck up a reasonable UI choice. On OS X, by default, it only happens for programs and requires you to close the dialog and then bring up the context menu for the program while holding a modifier key. You don't know how to do it unless you've actually read all of the way to the end of the dialog, so it generally protects people.

There are some interesting corner cases though, such as shell scripts. The file manager doesn't know if the thing that you tell it to open a shell script with is a text editor or a script interpreter, so may warn spuriously.

OK, and digging loose change out of your couch cushions is you making use of a banking platform.

Everybody involved here knows that "investment" means something very specific when you're handing money to a company to use in the formation and growth of their business. What happens when you funnel money towards a favored project through Kickstarter is no more an investment than losing some change in your couch is you making a bank deposit.

There's nothing wrong with Kickstarter or with people on both ends of the gift-giving making use of it. But it's not an investment. If you're one of these people that thinks you've just "invested" money when you go to see a movie, then the term - to you - is so absurdly broad as to have no meaning, especially not in the context of an actual discussion about business finance and project funding.

There are two problems. The first is that the OS allows you to run porn.jpg.exe having downloaded it from some random place on the 'net. I don't think that either OS X or Windows do: they'll both pop up a thing saying 'You are trying to run a program downloaded from the Internet, do you really want to?', which isn't normally something that happens when people try to open a file so ought to trigger them to avoid it (if it doesn't, then seeing the .exe extension probably won't either).

The second is that the OS allows programs and other file types to set icons at all before their first run. This also leads to confused deputy-like attacks where you think you're opening a file with one program but are actually opening it with something that will interpret it as code. The solution to this is probably to have programs keep their generic program icon until after their first run. If you double click on something that has a generic program icon, then you probably intend to run it...

This post needs a '-1 not even wrong' moderation. I started to write a reply to your points, but I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or completely fail to understand any of the parts of the hardware and software stacks involved.

Not really. Self has multiple prototype chains, Smalltalk and Java have only single inheritance. Both JavaScript and Smalltalk lack any declarative mechanism for defining classes in the language and do so by manipulating objects.

This removes the need for a shader language parser in the graphics driver. It still needs a compiler, unless you think the GPU is going to natively execute the bytecode. If you remove the compiler from a modern GPU driver, then there's very little left...

There are a few. Smalltalk obviously does, as does Self. Lisp also can, depending on how it's used. JavaScript is probably the mainstream language that fits closest (it's actually very close to Smalltalk). Java and C# both mostly do, though they wouldn't count as pure OO.

That is one thing that it absolutely is NOT. It's a donation platform, and some people asking for donations offer some incentives in exchange for your generosity. That's it. There is no investment. People who've given money are not vested in any way, except perhaps emotionally.

C++ is a language that is very good for generic programming. It doesn't really meet Alan Kay's definition of OO (and he's the one who coined the term), nor does it pass the Ingalls Test for OO. It has classes, but method dispatch is tied to the class hierarchy so if you want to really adopt an OO style you need to use multiple inheritance and pure abstract base classes, which is a very cumbersome way of using C++.

The worst C++ code is written by people who are thinking in C when they write C++, but the second-wrost C++ code is written by people who are really thinking in Smalltalk. If you're one of these people, then learn Objective-C: the language is far better at representing how you think about programs.

Any programming language can be used to write code in any style. You can write good OO code with a macro assembler if you want. However, every language has a set of styles that fit naturally with the language and ones that don't. You can force C++ to behave in an OO way, and it sort-of works, but it's not using the language in the most efficient way.

The main advantage of auto is in templates, where the type is something complex derived from template instantiations. You simply don't want to make it explicit. Oh, and in lambdas, where explicitly writing the type of the lambda is very hard (though you generally cast to std::function for assignment). As to using a float instead of an int... I have no idea how you'd do that with auto. The type of auto is the type that you initialise it with. If you're using a platform where you don't have hardfloat, then why do you have APIs that return floats? There's your bug, the use of auto was just a symptom.

And if you've never seen anyone use the algorithms library, then you must be using C++ in a very specialised environment. I've not seen any C++11 code that didn't use std::move. I've rarely seen a nontrivial C++ file that didn't use std::min or std::max, and most code will also use std::copy. The only code that I've seen that didn't use the algorithms library included is own, poorly optimised and buggy, versions of several of them.

First, WindowsMaker doesn't use Objective-C, it's written in C. However, GNUstep, which is the open source implementation of the Cocoa frameworks (originally the OpenStep specification, but they're tracking Apple changes) could use more help! Oh, and we support (on *NIX) a superset of the Objective-C language that Apple supports on their products, so I wouldn't say that Obj-C is more limited on Linux.

That said, and I say this as the maintainer of the GNUstep Objective-C implementation, I'd recommend C++, but with the two caveats:

• C++ is not an OO language. It sort-of supports OOP, but writing OO code in C++ is not the natural way of using the language.
• Don't look at any version of the language before C++11. It's just terrible and will damage your brain.

C++11 and C++14 have cleaned up C++ a lot. With shared_ptr and unique_ptr, you can write code with sane memory management. With perfect forwarding, lambdas, and variadic templates, you can write code that has most of the benefits of a late-bound language. I like a lot of Objective-C, but Apple broke the 'simple, orthogonal syntax' when they added declared properties and a few other things. Any successful programming language eventually becomes a mess of compromises and ugly corners. Some, like Python and C++, start that way, but at least C++ has been slowly improving over the last couple of versions.

The one thing where Objective-C is still a clear winner is in writing libraries that want to maintain a stable ABI. This is insanely difficult in C++ because the language doesn't have a clean separation of interface and implementation and relies a lot on inlining and static binding for performance. The down side, of course, is that once you have a library in Objective-C you're limited to consumers who also want to use Objective-C.

Oh, and Qt GUIs suck beyond belief on OS X - not sure what they're like on Windows, but I wouldn't recommend them for a portable UI. Good MVC design and a native UI is the only way to go if you really want a cross-platform GUI app that doesn't suck.

More than a quarter of British Muslims recently polled said they support militant Islamists who attack westerners they consider out of line with jihaddi sensibilities. That's 27% who applaud the slaughter of magazine publishers by ISIS-associated Muslim fanboys/girls. Those people think that ISIS is very Muslim, and is in fact a better example of practicing Islam than the more "moderate" groups who don't practice or support such violence. What is it, exactly, that you think Obama is demonstrating to those millions of people who simply laugh at his assessment of the Muslim-ness of one group or the next?

With whom are you having that debate? Bombs aren't supposed to make distinctions between innocent people and medieval-minded wackadoos following the Koran's guidance and lopping heads off of the local insufficiently-Islmaic villagers. It's human intel, targeting, and decisions that make that distinction.

No, you're just annoyed that someone actually paid attention to the words someone said.

And "everyone else" is going to look to Obama as the arbiter of what is, and is not, proper interpretation of the Koran? Really?

So, here you are, twisting and turning, trying to avoid the actual commented-on issue, which asserts that Obama has the power to "take away" Islamist street cred, or bestow it. Limit your comments to whether that's actually true, or not. Which Muslim, in which country, is going to be thinking one moment that ISIS adherents are strictly faithful Muslims fighting the good fight against evil things like women who want to read and write, and then based on something Obama says, change their mind and decide that position (and thus ISIS) is no longer actually Islamic? What kind of person do you think holds ISIS as being defender of the faith but who also holds Obama as someone they should listen to as an authority on what is, or is not, authentically Muslim? Can you point to a single person, anywhere, who holds both positions?

You've just made them even happier with their choices. You fundamentally misunderstand what makes them tick. They want you to hate them. They're banking on it. They need you to hate them, and they're willing to do things like roast people alive in order to make you hate them even more.