The OS is still in full control. If it leaves the doors wide open by default, it's the OS's problem. I repeat: any chipset impementing PCIe and thunderbolt provides full software control over what goes and what doesn't. Perhaps one or more OSes out there are a bit too permissive by default.

USB doesn't require any obscene amounts of power to process the protocol. Many drivers, though, are written by people who don't know much about USB, and really wanna go home to do things other than read communications protocols. I'm a communications guy, I've been reading RFCs back when FIDO standards were still a hot new thing, and I don't have anything bad really to say about USB. I use it for an I/O backplane in real-time industrial communications. Works a treat. It's great that I don't have to design my own 480Mbit/s transport, enumeration and basic device profiles. Admittedly, in most cases once the userland gets access to it, there isn't much USB left, and what's left is heavily bastardized. About the only OS that gets it half-right is OS X, although even there it doesn't expose the transaction scheduling offered by the hardware. Windows user mode driver framework is a sick joke, and Linux - well - as long as you stick to a single kernel version you're OK, otherwise you can go nuts in an afternoon.

Huh? Bluetooth has a megabit of bandwidth, you can certainly push uncompressed CD audio over it.

You're completely off base. Code generation is a vital productivity tool. Properly applied, it lets you produce code quicker and with less defects. If you're developing a large scale project and are not using various code generators to ease your job in repetitive tasks, you're doing it wrong. Qt's use of moc is exactly what code generators are supposed to be used for. I lament that they haven't taken it far enough, in fact.

That's silly. As long as the code doesn't invoke undefined or implementation-defined behavior, you can be exactly sure what the compiler can and cannot do, modulo implementation bugs. If you're invoking undefined behavior, you can argue all you want, because for all I know you'll be getting different assembly output every time you compile the thing, and it's your own fault. C++ admittedly lacks in full identification and diagnostics of undefined behavior, so a bit too much checking is still left in programmer's hands. That's my only lament with C++. Otherwise it's a cool language.

The C++ that was available during NT kernel's design is quite literally a different programming language than modern C++, or even C++98. C++ is an excellent choice for an OS kernel.

C++ is a fairly modern, high-level language where it's fairly easy to produce type-safe, grounds-up designs that use zero unsafe C features. And if you must call into C or precambrian C++, you can wrap those in type- and otherwise safe wrappers.

The "esoteric" things in C++ are precisely the things that let you use it as a high level language, and not as Java or C. C++ offers a higher level of abstraction than Java, at least since the arrival of C++11. About the only mainstream feature still absent from C++ is free-form introspection. It's already possible to use template machinery to create types with full introspection, but any such approach doesn't apply to the types created manually using plain C++ syntax. The other feature is imperative compile-time programming, also known as LISP macros, but then only LISP really has those and nothing else IIRC.

It's not mind boggling if you understand the syntax of C. It so happens that many people program in C for years without having a solid understanding of what it is that they are doing. I'd almost say that if you consider yourself "the best" in C, you should be able to come up with a mostly standards-compliant parser for it in a couple of days, doing it mostly from memory, and certainly writing up a parser for a subpart of the language, like type expressions, should take a couple hours at most. Otherwise I'd find it a hard sell to consider someone a top-notch C person. Good - perhaps, but not top-notch.

Frankly said, I think that this is rather overstating things. Modern C++ has plenty of idioms that you should use first, without attempting to come up with your revolutionary redesigns of a common wooden wheel. Effective C++ and Modern Effective C++ are required reading, as well as Strostrup's most recent (at any time) edition of The C++ Programming Language. Also Exceptional C++, and Modern C++ Design. I can't help but mention the interview with Alex Stepanov, where he explains the mathematical basis for STL (You thought that software engineering requires no abstract, higher non-CSy math? Think again!)

C++ is a big language, and people who know their craft actually do know all of its features, and can probably point to relevant sections in the standard when they talk about things. I'd say: meh, pebkac.

Ah, so there are people out there who get it! Thank you for a voice of reason in this "I know better than you what's good for you" insanity.

As someone who has attempted suicide and just barely made it, I think that the so-called mental health experts are a bit stuck up in seeing things from nobody's perspective but theirs. The freedom to lead your way the way you choose to must include ending your own life at any time of your choosing. It is true that quite often people who attempted suicide are happy with making it out alive, and being able to live their lives. I certainly am!! On the other hand, the thought that some "expert" who is not in my frame of mind would have the ability to, essentially, take over my ability to take my life - is downright scary. Just because I'm happy with the life I have now doesn't mean that I'd be happy about someone preventing me from attempting to take my life when I did so. Two decades later, I'd consider it a gross invasion of privacy, and a horrific, slippery slope takeover of basic human liberty.

There is a very fine line between truly helping someone, and "helping" someone by - as you unashamedly admit - putting someone else's feelings over your own. Yes, as a society we have an obligation to give as much help as we can, but that help IMHO should not extend to overriding the decision of someone who wishes to take their life away. I find it, actually, completely incomprehensible that people think that preservation of human life over all else should be forced down everyone's throat. I also find it not all that clear that suicidal thoughts should be treated like a malaise in all cases. My attempt at my own life made me into a person that I am now, and who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to say that I'd be better off not having tried it? It's quite possible the worst case of "what if" imaginable, because you're not merely hypothesizing, you intend to take action.

The implication that all people with suicidal thoughts have a "very real chance" of taking down someone else is just an icing on the cake. You're nuts. I'm not a murderer, and can't imagine how attempting to take my own life would have ever made me take the life of someone else while doing so - other than indirectly, say by someone close to me dying of a stress-induced heart attack. I can't imagine that any sort of a majority, or even a significant minority of people who attempt a suicide are murderers and would take down others with them - not unless they were murderers to begin with, and suicial thoughts were just an enabler, like alcohol or drugs would be for others.

TL;DR: You're nuts, you really are.

USPS also scans every mailpiece. Seriously, they do, and have been doing for almost two decades.

They do not have a point. Suppose that the GPS was in civilian control. It still could be used for drones and nuclear warheads. Basically nobody asks these people the most basic question of all: suppose you have your way, what would be acceptable to you? The unfortunate answer is: nothing is ever acceptable to those nutjobs. Really, that's what makes them the nutjobs that they are. As long as you have a satellite-based global positioning system, it's equally available to anyone, everywhere, for whatever purpose. That's the basic premise of the thing. There's no way, technically or otherwise, to regulate its use. What those nutjobs want is a pipe dream.

That's the thing though - you're punishing them for what they say, and I think that's fundamentally wrong here. I basically say that unless libel laws apply, it's nobody's business what those fucktards publicly write on Twitter. It makes them look vile and stupid, but IMHO the buck stops there.

Sure you have the freedom to fire over anything in most circumstances, but that doesn't mean that you should.

Well, what the mob is making up amounts to law, because there are real-life consequences of it.

I don't even think that there are any "people like this" in our society. The remarks, while public and vile, are just that. I don't think it's any larger characterization of those people's character. Sure, neither you or me would ever post anything like that, not even anonymously I'm sure, but I'd be very careful with turning those identified into something much worse than they are. Some people do extremely stupid shit, given (im)proper circumstances - things that perhaps they'd never usually do.