If Linus is right, C++ attracks bad programmers. So another language would not help. Personally, I stick to C. It is not the perfect language, but all others I tried are worse..

Well C++ has many features. They are meant to be improvements. But they are basically *all* broken.

This is just syntactic sugar. But even this is broken: You have to put the complete class definition in the header - including private implementation details. How stupid is this? You can actually have much better encapsulation in C by putting an incomplete struct in the header and define the struct in the C file.

I am not sure what you mean by this... C++ is good if you want to do compile-time optimizations and you don't trust the compiler to do it for you, so you write your own program transformations using templates which run at compile time and generate super efficient code. Some interesting math libraries are written this way. But ofcourse, templates as a compile time language are just horrible and you would be much better off to write code generators in a proper programming language instead.

Yes. This only works if the user has an account. But he might be able to break out of a locked-down account which only runs a specific command.

I once started to add a feature to firefox in my spare time and still haven't finished it because of it took much time... This C++ mess was certainly part of the reason, layers on top of layers... and horrible long compile times. I know very few people who write good C++ code.

Sorry for the sarcastic reply.

I sympathize with the idea that scientist should try to explain their ideas to the general public, but I do not
agree with the idea that scientific findings should only be taken serious if it is explained so well that I can be
understood by the general public. Some things are just too difficult to be easily explained - and even if this is possible
in some cases, it might take too much time and effort to explain it well. So yes, I think political decisions must
sometimes be based on the authoritative advice from certain scientific insitutions.

True. Feynman is great.

But it is a long time since I read that book, and I think that while it explains the key ideas very well I would be surprized if it enables an average person to do actual computations in quantum field theory to verify some of its predictions on their own. For this, you have to dive into the math on a much deeper level. So the point still stands.

In fact, the conspiracy theory that the government is funding climate scientists who say that global warming is real and caused by human activity with the purpose to strengthen the government's authoritarian grip on society is a myth. But also the more plausible idea that scientists exaggerate their findings to get more funding does not seem to be true:
http://arstechnica.com/science...

Seriously?

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

Where is the layman's textbook on Quantum Electrodynamics? Oh, it must be all fake!

there are some reaons why starting with zero might be better:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users...

Obviously we are also debating whether global warming exists or is caused by humans. To me - as a scientist - this is a deeply worrying sign of ignorance.

This is an interesting opinion. You present it as obvious, but it is the opposite of what most people who studied this seems to think.

This is clearly not basic economics. Is is more about estimating future risks and estimating economic cost which seems difficult to me. The term "climate scientists and their activist friends" also indicates a bit of paranoid thinking.

Nonsense. The issue is that people who do fear certain political actions are badmouthing the underlying science and the scientists involved instead of debating political questions. I wish we would actually debate how to best deal with global warming instead of whether it exists or what causes it.

I don't see your point. Xrender works just fine and just traced some applications using xtrace and they happily make use of it. And yes, this works perfectly over the network.

Changing this would mean breaking a binary protocol with decades of backwards compatibility. I do not think the Linux community could do something more stupid than breaking compatibility with X11. As if those many applications magically rewrite themselves. And applications which use direct rendering work exactly the same way on X as anywhere else, so there is not even something to gain.

What is missing for the desktop is a consistent and polished GUI on top of that. Unfortunately, gnome, Ubuntu, all made the same mistake as Microsoft: Abandoning their old stuff to get something hip which also works on tablets. Now we have an inconsistent mess that is worse than what we had a few years ago.

Give it up. The nuclear fanboys on slashdot will not believe it.

The nuclear industry itself states that this is the reason they don't build nuclear power plants (John Rowe):
http://www.bloomberg.com/video...

You mean where the citation is a broken link to a buisnessweek article from 2008?

26? Do you have a source for that? According to:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

This this seems a bit unlikely to me.