I hereby award you the Hermes Conrad award for meticulous technical correctness. It may be collected at the Central Bureaucracy upon reception of a properly filled out, signed, stamped and notarized Award Reception form.

Blame C, zero-terminated strings and strcpy(). That you can copy a string into a buffer that can't hold it with no sanity checking is a disaster waiting to happen. Same that you read beyond the buffer waiting forever for a terminating \0 that'll never happen. Because you don't have objects you don't have sanity checks, even with the "safe" versions you have to make sure to pass the same buffer size twice. No doubt there's code like this where you haven't defined the size through a constant:

char *dst[512]; // used to be 1024
strncopy( dst, src, 1024 ):

"High level" programming languages don't let you do that. There's no way to read from a QFile to a QByteArray in Qt/C++ that can cause a buffer overflow. There's no way to read from "beyond the end" of a QByteArray unless you deliberately get the internal pointer and use that directly, all the functions are safe. The C model is that everything is really little boxes in memory that you can store bits and bytes in and the rest is interpretation. You can do stuff like this with no casts or converts:

int a = 5;
char *b = &a;
b = "abcd";
// value of a is now something entirely different

I know there's a very few low-level, high performance scenarios where this may be useful. But I'd say for >95% of developers, >95% of the time it's only an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot.

We did that a few times with Texas Hold'Em except with a winner-takes-it-all prize, but the challenge was finding the sweet spot where there's enough at stake that people take it a bit seriously but not too seriously. With no money involved it was just crazy random play, people didn't care so they played the way that was most fun like playing every hand, pulling off the most absurd bluffs and so on. It gets old pretty quick and there's no penalty to busting out, the resemblance to real poker was minimal.

On the other hand, a few got very competitive and very serious the moment there was even a bit of money involved - and I know enough about where they work and what they make to know it was pocket money it was just their personality quirks kicking in. That too ended up something of a buzz-kill, after all we're friends chatting and having beers not pro tournament players crunching statistics. If you avoid getting tipsy at the end of the evening because of the prize, the prize is too large. Instead we mostly play Wii/WiiU.

It's something of a prisoner's dilemma. I'm feeling quite safe here in Norway without a gun because getting hold of illegal guns is fairly hard. Not extremely hard, but enough that your petty pickpocket/mugger/burglar won't bother. And your victims won't have a gun so it's overkill to rob people at gun point, it just attracts a whole lot of unwanted attention and will put you in jail for longer.

Now if criminals had to assume the regular victim might have a gun he'd have to arm himself, no good robbing your victim at knife point only to be shot dead once you try leaving. Likewise, once you have to assume quite ordinary criminals have guns I'd want to arm myself, so I could shoot them before they'd shoot me. It's also a value issue that can't be definitively answered, do you want to defend your property with your life?

I know that personally I'd rather not put my life on the line if I can help it, between the police and insurance companies I'd rather let them deal with it. Things are just things, they're not my life. That's just me though, others might be of the opinion that the only real defense that doesn't rely on forces beyond your control is self-defense. That you, personally, have to stop him from robbing your wallet and if you get hurt or killed in the process well that's the price.

5) Cops knocking down the door - WTF what have my kids done now?

The management of my apartment building seem to have two ways of communicating:

1) Facebook group
2) Posters/notice in my mailbox

Sure you can reach them by email and they'll reply by email. But my impression is that this is a "legacy" method compared to a Facebook message. If it's not important enough to warrant physical notices, it's Facebook or not at all.

But hey, you can chuck a cup of coffee over the keyboard then beat someone to death with it and it'll keep on truckin'.

Not sure about the coffee, but the rest is has been a killer feature of IBM keyboards ever since the model M.

Smart people can make a lot of money in fields that don't advance human civilization much, particularly not in science and technology. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, Henry Ford wanted to give the average American a car and turn a nice profit on doing it. Pardon me for saying so, but I think those are far more well deserved than developing another high frequency trading algorithm for Wall Street or something like that.

If it came through the warranty period alright, I don't see that there's any problem. Tesla has probably just figured out this hits relatively few but heavy users and ambassadors who'll be happy to get a new battery instead of being hit with a $15,000 bill and continue driving sales. After all, 125,000/8 = 15,625 miles is more than the average US driver goes per year (13,476 miles) and Teslas have probably not been bought by those making regular long hauls.

It does create a rather perverse incentive to drive your Tesla to battery failure before the warranty is up though - say a coast-to-coast supercharger road trip or three on free electricity. I don't know if they'll replace it with a brand new or a refurb but either way it'll be worth more than with a 7.5 year old battery. As long as they're in massive growth sales 5-8 years ago are so much lower that it might not matter though, right now it's all about expansion.

That there's tribes living in the Amazon that aren't part of the economy aren't a drag on anyone else. If you fall out of the economy, that's more your problem than the economy's. In reality it won't come to that though, because the rich will want to have personal assistants, luxury housing, goods and services. They'll get a dress from a famous dress designer no matter what computers and robots could do. Those servants will again put money into a worker's economy. It might be severely diluted by the time it reaches you, but even in a third world African village there's a working market.

However, labor in general is like everything else in capitalism subject to supply and demand. Too much supply, too little demand and wages spiral downwards. The people who have capital may find that they're becoming richer and richer simply by doing nothing, while the workers find that labor pays less and less. On the other hand, that means those with money can hire other people to do things for them cheaply. And that's where I think his horse analogy fails, we prefer service by cars instead of service by horse. While I like some self-service, in many cases I'd prefer talking to an actual human being. It's just that personal service is expensive and so not worth the cost.

I think you're the one with too narrow a definition, for example I can very well imagine Democrats trolling Republican websites and vice versa. Not to make anyone go emotionally overboard, but to sow discord and disrupt their campaign. I can imagine people trolling Scientology forums to stop them recruiting members for their wacky sect. Competitors might go trolling in review sections posting false reviews and rumors.

Debating, even if you're playing the devil's advocate is not trolling as it's taking on a position that's not yours to enhance the debate. Preaching is also not trolling, even if your impervious to counterarguments or changing your mind that's your contribution to the debate. Everything else, everyone looking to disrupt, derail, destroy the forum or alienate individuals I consider a form of trolling, including abusing it for other purposes like spamming.

I'm not sure why you say trolls can't be contrarian then go on to show an example of a troll taking on an extremely opposite position compared to everyone else. What they won't do is play by any civilized or even rational rules of debate. But they will taunt you with bizarre, illogical points of view often with a side of personal snark to make you write a long and fiery diatribe pointing out all the flaws. And then keep baiting you until you catch on.

Or the TL;DR version: Trolling is the noise in the discussion's signal-to-noise ratio.

That there are so few goals is what makes soccer so huge. I played a different sport where the result might be more like 10-4, nobody really cares about a bad referee call or a few missed chances or the lucky goal it's obvious the better team won anyway. In soccer the result might be 2-1 and there's no end to the bullshit fans will make up about controversial decisions, missed chances, lucky shots and whatnot that meant that they could have, should have, would have won or drawn. It's somewhere between sports and Texas Hold 'Em, the poker pro will win on average but on a good day the worst team walks away with the victory. Fully deserved of course *cough*.

I'm about to horribly abuse this quote:

YOU: What if they don't take the bait? What if they don't react at all?
BULLIES: Do you still have your notebook? The function of bullying is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they have a mental breakdown. They are not in control - we are. That is the strength of bullying.

Bullies do not quit easily though feigned indifference. They're on a mission to break you and they know that deep down it probably hurt anyway. And shutting down your real emotional responses is so not a good idea for a number of reasons, it's practically inflicting yourself a mental injury.

You're being very dishonest when you leave this part out:

By those standards, airplanes have basically stood still for the last 50 years. Sure they get a bit lighter, a bit better engines, a bit better aerodynamics but they're not radically different nor faster. Already the very first commercial transatlantic flight Berlin-New York was done in 25 hours, like orders faster than a boat and still on the same order - 8.5 hours - today. Same with cars, they've come a long way since the T-Ford but it could do 40-45 mph with 13-21 MPG. What would you get today, 35 MPG? You don't drive cross country on a thimble, that's for sure.

We're not talking about that kind of improvements when it comes to computers. We're talking about that 30 years ago memory was measured in kilobytes, today it's in gigabytes. If computers double performance in 10 years, we think that's awfully slow progress. 30+ years for a 10x improvement? 100 years until a terabyte is last century's gigabyte? Let's be honest, the kind of marginal - or rather, normal - improvements you're talking about would only be scoffed at. When - not if - we hit that limit that the walls are so thin they can't be thinner they might be roughly as good as they'll ever get.

C++ is one of the most complex, inscrutable computer languages ever created. (...) Is that by intent, or did it just happen?

Yes and no, depending on how you look at it. Once upon a time like 40+ years ago there was C. While there was others, C was massively successful in the 1970s because it was a very good but really thin abstraction layer over assembler, which was very common at the time. That means you could write C and it'd run on many different kinds of machines, conversely if your platform wanted to go anywhere it had to have a C compiler. It was imperative and procedural, which was fine but computer scientists also wanted an object oriented language. How do you do that when you don't have a massive staff and budget? You extend C. Early C++ compiled down to C which then compiled on every platform with a C compiler. All the other very low level C-isms just came along for the ride. And any behavior that wasn't defined in C, well it couldn't be defined in C++.

A lot of it is simply the result of C++ paving the way, it was often the first C-derived language to do it and a lot of it turned into ungodly kludges, but you were pretty much committed to keeping that syntax working. So you keep adding and adding but never subtracting, never cleaning up. It's easy to say "lets start over and do a clean rewrite" but hard to achieve the necessary momentum, many have tried and failed. And with locked down devices it's now the device manufacturers that control if a given language will be available, you can make UltraC but if you can't make an iOS app in UltraC then the value is more limited. Outside Apple, Google and Microsoft I don't see who can pull it off, Sun could once but Oracle could never make a new language. Not counting web server languages like Perl/PHP/RoR, but local end user software.