> So we need to shift the blame on movies, computer games, music, you name it.

This has been going for on for at least the past 100 years. Americans historically love to play the blame game. Some made up bullshit excuse instead of finding & treating the root problem. One small set (or sect/group/cult) of society tries to blame an inanimate object for all of society's woes and spreads their propaganda to anyone who will listen.

Every "next technology" is always scapegoated.

1900 Film
1910 ???
1920 Prohibition (Alcohol), Phonographs
1930 Jazz, Movies
1940 Radio
1950 Dancing
1960 Psychedelic Drugs, Sex
1970 Rock n Roll, Movies (again)
1980 MTV, DnD, Heavy Metal
1990 Computer Games
2000 ???
2010 Guns

As they say in Japan/China:

    "The nail that sticks up gets pounded down"

Shoot the messenger instead of listening to the message! Sarcasm: Yeah let's ignore the problem hoping it will go away!

What a sad, dysfunctional, and completely fucked up society we live in.

--
First Contact is coming 2024

Even in our (Australia's) supposedly modern democracy, politicians can say anything at all to get elected and can't be held to it once they are.

Is there any place where politicians held to what they say in their campaign or political parties are held to what's in their manifesto?

In other words, causes, no matter how big, don't really get power until they can pay enough to be taken seriously. That might mean lobbying, marketing, or awareness campaigns, but it still takes money to look like your cause has merit.

I wonder how many of these groups first use their influence to gain a source of public funding. Which would entrench their position.

Everyone has noticed there are a lot of very pro-Russian people popping up on websites and I can't really understand them. The facts seem very apparent that Russia has done some extremely objectionable things, and threatens to do even more objectionable things, and the justifications for those actions seem extraordinarily weak.

Maybe some of the commenters are paid by Russia (I think that's been documented with some blogs), but a lot of them seem to be sincere westerners and I can't figure them out. Do they have Russian ancestry that makes them pro-Russia? Are they just really counter-cultural and suspicious of Western interference in the East?

Personally I'm fairly pro-West, anti-authoritarian, and have Ukrainian ancestry so I have strong feelings on the subject, but I still think I make a fairly impartial assessment of the situation. I just can't figure out the ideology that drives the Russian supporters.

> C++11 is awesome and has brought it back to modern day relevancy. I

There is that old joke ...

There are 2 problems with C++

1. Its design
2. Its implementation

C++ started out as an awesome C with classes extension! Every C++ programmer should read these 2 classics:

* The Design and Evolution of C++
* Modern C++ Design

Today C++ is an over-engineered design-by-committee that unnecessary includes everything and the kitchen sink (translation: clusterfuck). Basic problems of idiotic archaic baggage such as "long long", lack of a proper binary literal (which took years; over-engineered user literals*), macros that aren't type safe, no standardized name mangling nor run-time functionality to query a mangled function name, etc.

C++ when used sparingly can be a great tool. A balance between the simplicity of C and the power of C++ abstraction is ideal.

* http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

I don't think Heartbleed says anything fundamental about open source security, but it might alter the discussion of how certain low level packages are managed. By any measure OpenSSL is a very important package, but it's also a bit generic. It has a very defined role that everyone needs, but I'm not sure how many people really have a motive to work on it in specific. It might be that the community needs to find a way to devote more resources to maintaining and auditing those packages.

Sure, and your retina can't see VGA resolution resolution either.
Not if you stand far enough away from the screen...

e,g, if it's the visor on your "cleaning suit".

Heinlein's 1966 classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is wonderful and visionary on many levels but still tripped over some contemporary assumptions. Like one big computer ran everything, including the phone system. It could synthesize audio but it had to jump through fancy hoops to do video.

The other assumption made here was that it wasn't too difficult to create a functional AI. Something which modern authors don't tend to consider as easy as producing video good enough to fool people.

Most authors back in Asimov's day saw the world like that - astrogators using books of navigation tables, slide rules, taking sextant readings from the stars, etc.

An obvious example of this would Heinlein's "Starman Jones" from 1953. Where the use of such tables forms a critical part of the plot. With the real Apollo Guidance Computer being far more "user friendly" :)

So one person guesses in the mid-19th century that we will have horseless carriages in the future--but also thinks they'll run on steam engines and cause great depletion of our wood and coal supplies.

The first steam driven vehicles date from the early 19th century. One of the problems with the London Steam Carriage (of 1803) was that it cost more to run than a horse drawn carriage (needing a fireman in addition to a driver.) There were steam cars built which used liquid (petroleum based) fuels too.

Another person forsees an interstate highway system, but thinks it will be used for giant horse-drawn land trains.

By the mid 19th century nobody would seriously consider trains drawn by anything other than a locomotive.
Even around the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition between steam, internal combustion (both types) and electric engines when it came to "horseless carriages". Ironically a century old electric car can have a similar range to a modern one.