Private and unimplemented is the key, on old compilers.

On new compilers use:

class MyClass {
MyClass(const MyClass&) = delete;
// ...

Doesn't matter what access specifier you use, because any attempt, from any code, to copy a MyClass will be diagnosed as an error by the compiler.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.

Nonsense. The only way you don't know what that means in C++ is if the code was written by a complete, drooling idiot.

Seriously, this is the first thing C programmers pull out to criticize C++... but in 23 years of professional C++ programming, I have never seen bizarre arithmetic operator overloading used in practice, except for iostreams, and you get used to that pretty quickly, given that it's been part of the standard library since very early on.

I have a few times seen libraries of mathematical operations, say on vectors or tensors, that made heavy use of arithmetic operator overloading, but it was so they could say "i = j * 5" where i and j are n-dimensional matrices. In those cases, operator overloading not only makes sense, it's a dramatic improvement over C.

If you want to criticize C++, there are lots of valid criticisms, mostly around the huge variety of features and the complexity of their interactions, which can get really subtle. And you can criticize many of the insane template metaprogramming constructs (though those can be really useful sometimes, particularly in building up infrastructure that allow the compiler to diagnose all sorts of errors you might make). If you don't like "invisible" stuff, you can criticize the abuses that can be made of constructors and destructors. But operator overloading? Faugh.

Or, in the case of the last two, intentionally declaring them private and NOT implementing them (or if you have a C++11 compiler, explicitly deleting them), so as to make the class non-copyable. Relatively few classes need to be copyable. Declaring the copy ctor and assignment operator private ensures that client code can't accidentally copy your non-copyable objects. Not implementing them ensures that if class code accidentally copies an instance, you get a link error.

OP gets things turned around: Canonical released the Unity interface for Ubuntu in the summer of 2010, and then made it the mandatory desktop on Ubuntu in mid-2011 sparking an exodus of users to other distros, Windows, and OSX. Without getting into some curious timing... Just about a year later in the summer of 2012, Microsoft released the Metro interface for Windows 8, copying many of the tiled UI ideas and touch/gesture-on-the-desktop that had been rejected by more geeky and novice users alike -- only this time into a far larger market.

Honestly, from inside Redmond it was very strange to watch this happen, with a lot of people asking 'what the hell are we doing?' and variations on 'didn't the little guy fall on his face when he tried this?' The parallels were almost comical; with Ballmer and Sinofsky insisting that "customers like this!" in words almost identical to Shuttleworth two years earlier, and similar expressions of dismay and denial of the humiliating reception that followed. Though Ballmer and Sinofsky wielded market power Shuttleworth could only dream of, the outcomes were predictable and there had been plenty of warning. The hard part for these guys to accept is that when your ideas are so thoroughly rejected by people/consumers/end users -- and you keep doing the unwanted thing anyway -- it's not like the audience remains as motivated to see what you come up with next**. They just start ignoring you.

** (even if the very same UI concepts work well in another context -- in this case, on a mobile handset)

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It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.

Sure, and if they wanted to they could sell gasoline-powered cars, too.

Tesla is taking a shot at modernizing the car industry, and not just with their choice of powerplant. The dealer system made sense when you needed local expertise, but information is much easier to distribute today. Dealers are an anachronism -- and they know it, which is why they're fighting so hard to retain the regulatory restrictions on direct sales.

There are lots of practical reasons why Tesla doesn't want to go the franchise route, but besides all of those, it's just not where Tesla wants to go. They may fail. Saturn tried to buck the old model, too, not by eliminating dealerships but by enforcing tight rules on franchises and requiring a set-price sales model, and they ultimately failed, first falling back to the old model of jerking customers around, and then ultimately getting shut down entirely. Maybe Tesla will fail, too, but I don't think so, and I'm glad they're sticking to their guns.

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.

And double time on Sundays.

Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.

That's a rather strong statement. Do you mean that they don't compete right now, or that they never can/will compete? Because your statement sounds like the latter, and I don't buy it. Central generation clearly can benefit from economies of scale, but distribution is enormously expensive, both in terms of infrastructure cost and power losses.

You read wrong. HTTPS doesn't prevent advertising. I suppose it prevents ads injected by ISPs, etc., but very, very few ads that you see get there that way.

Mod parent up.

"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.

We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.

You've put your finger on the key point... corporate taxes are a way to hide taxes from taxpayers, so they don't realize just how much they're paying.

Personally, I think that's a bad thing, not a good one. People should know what they're paying so they can decide if they're getting good value for their money.

It's also extremely harmful to highly disaggregated supply chains and strongly rewards deep vertical integration. That's bad because it means supplies of materials that have multiple uses either get locked to a single use or else the companies that control those supplies become ideally-positioned to own huge swaths of the market. This is because if you tax revenue, the tax gets applied at every step in the supply chain. If it's a 5% tax and there are 10 steps in the chain (10 companies adding a bit of value and selling on to the next company in the chain, up until the last which sells to consumers), then the tax that must be build into the final price could be as high as 63%. In contrast, a company that buys up the entire supply chain only has to build a 5% tax into their prices. This translates into a huge competitive advantage for vertical integration.