True, because it is basically terrible for everything, it is terrrible also for using it in the same way as C.

Yes, RAII is nice. But only *some* memory and resource leaks go away, basically the ones which are trivial, because allocation and deallocation simply follow lexical scope. Ofcourse, this is only trivial in languages which do not have exceptions. Exceptions make this simple thing very complicated, and without RAII it is indeed almost impossible to avoid resource leaks in C++. But without exceptions, it is not so much of a deal. In other words, RAII had to be invented after the fact to make exceptions usable in C++ because - again - some feature were introduced without much thought.

This is only a tragedy for people who have to use C++ or think they have to. There is nothing more liberaring than to realize that all this complexity of C++ is completely unnecessary.

I disagree that the complexity from C++ is only the result of being the compromise of these three properties. Ofcourse, such a language would be somewhat more difficult than a new language without backwards compatibility to C, but I still think that most complexity in C++ comes from adding whatever feature was cool at the time *without too much thought*. I had to debug my fair share of subtle problems in C++ code (mostly from other people - I stopped using C++ for my own projects years ago) and usually the problems are the new language features that C++ added to C which cause problems. I know excellent programmers who can use them correctly, but most don't. The reason is that they have surprising and hard to understand properties. See, for example, the keynote of Scott Meyer (Effective C++) at the d language conference this year. He lists a lot of arbitrary design flaws in C++.

Please understand that there are many gaps in our knowledge in almost all areas of science. The conclusion that "clearly they don't understand the system" because there are some effects which are not yet completely understood is basically the standard argument brought up by all kinds of people against scentific findings which go against their esoteric beliefs.

For example: "they don't know how life originated, clearly they do not understand life so evolution is wrong and god created the earth 6000 years ago". Or: "they don't know how the brain works, clearly they do not understand anything about it so how can they know that mind does not life in another esoteric dimension where it can commincate with the deaths".

This kind of argument ignores that there is a lot of stuff we actually do know - including the climate. I kindly suggest hat you leave it to people who studied these problems to comment about what "we" know about it and what not and not try extrapolate from your helpdesk experience about something you cannot possible have any clue about from working at a helpdesk.

This is circular reasoning. You can just turn that argument around: If the law says the inventions always belong to the inventor and not to the company, then the salary cannot be compensation for the rights to the inventions. If the company is not happy with this, then DON'T OFFER THAT JOB. See, works either way.

No, as far as I know it runs Wayland. The same as Jolla. I would replace my aging N9 with a new Linux phone with X11, but sadly there is none. We now have Linux phones with no backwards compatibility to Linux... Sigh.

Something like this: http://srp.stanford.edu/links....
I wonder why this has never been implemented in openssh. (There are patches and it is supported by lsh).

It seems you are right about the password authentication. Somehow I thought SSH would do something more clever where the password is not sent over the network, but this does not seem to be the case. In this case public key would still be safer (two factors), but SSH would not leak your password during a MITM attack.

I doubt this. There are people who verify the fingerprints. And even if you do this only sometimes this is useful. So a large scale MITM attack on ssh would be very obvious. Also if you do a MITM on ssh you would not be able to obtain the password, because it is not transmitted. So to expand the attack they would need to MITM the ssh connections and then use this to install a backdoor. I would say this is far to intrusive to do on a large scale.

While I agree with most other things you said, I think you got this completely wrong. Peer review is done by volunteers and publishing is relatively cheap (and the traditional scientific publishers make a lot of profit). You can easily operate a journal with very minor resources. And this is exactly the reason there are many pay-to-publish journals which are crap. It is just very cheap to set them up. But not all of these journals are crap (PLOS ONE is the most prominent example of a highly-ranked journals of this kind) and those which are crap are not because they are pay-to-publish. And many traditional publishers have crap journals too (remember the fake journals from Elsevier?). There is simply no direct relationship between the publishing model and quality.

The real reason the good journals are still mostly the traditional ones is simply momentum. As a scientist you need to publish in good journals to get attention to your work. The good journals get to select the most interesting research because everybody submits there first. And the readers (other scientists) read these journals exactly because it has the most interesting content. It is a self-sustaining cycle. Because - as you said - scientists have usually free institutional access to most journals, there is also not too much pressure for change. Only the public gets screwed because it does not get direct access to the research output and also because university libraries have to pay for the over-priced journals. But things are slowly changing because funding agencies start to demand open-access.

The violation of Bell's inequalities shows that there are no local hidden variable theories, but there might be non-local hidden variable theories. But in contrast to what you seem to think, non-local hidden variables theories do not necessarily enable faster than light (FTL) communication.
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I am still angry about Nokia. 10 thousands of jobs lost and the only mobile platform which was nice from a technology point of view destroyed. All for a hopeless attempt to get some market shared for Windows Mobile.

Well, the truth is we have the non-locality anyway. Whatever happens which reduces the measurement to a definite result is non-local. And - ofcourse - there has to be something like this. Stil, I am not too convinced by the pilot wave theory, but it is at least an attempt to deal with the inherent problems of QM by trying to create a proper physical theory, not by philosophical bullshit.

No. There is some kind of non-locality which does not imply FTL transmisson of information.The effects in QM are exactly of this kind.

Sadly, the CIA has already set a new standard here.

Rather obviously it does not work out in the wash. This discussion was about the massive waste of energy in the US which leads to a per capita consumption which is about twice that of other highly developed countries such as Japan and Germany and order of magnitude compared to developing countries. The externalities of the energy use affect people globally (like the war in Iraq and its dire consquences or global warming). As such, your idea that "It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending" is simple wrong.