I long for a police force whose sole task is to protect the clear meaning of the Constitution, with the authority and balls to arrest any federal employee or contractor.

(Not really. I have not idea that it would work out well. But a girl can fantasize...)

I suspect that If the producers maximize profit by some combination of good writing/acting, product placements, syndication / iTunes / Google Play / etc. fees, it's a win.

I don't see technical accuracy as an explicit factor anywhere in that formula. Heck, I loved The Office, and I'm just guessing they weren't realistically depicting life at a paper company.

This reminds me of vehicles traveling at the speed of plot.

Russia Today is quite openly the a foreign propaganda arm of the Russian Govt. that doesn't even pretend to be independent.

And NPR is a mouthpiece for liberals. That doesn't mean their stories are wrong, just that they listener needs to carefully distinguish fact from spin.

What if they can't speak Spanish?

They are Canadian, the Bank of Canada is (politely) asking people to stop "Spocking" their Canadian five dollar bank notes ("bills").

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is an interesting, thoughtful story.

Hollywood doesn't do interesting and thoughtful.

QED

I'd be much more confident if this was being done in England or Scandinavia (cf Real Humans).

...laura

I suspect the Supreme Court is a bit less corrupt.

Sather (and Eiffel and Smalltalk etc) are less broken than Simula, I'll grant you that.

I do come at this from the point of view both as an engineer working in the high-performance computing area, and as a programming language theorist. People like Stepanov, Knuth, Dijkstra, Luca Cardelli, Alan Kay, Benjamin Pierce, and many others have written and spoken (sometimes at length) on the problems with implementation inheritance. And the fact that most OO proponents consistently tell you to avoid it ("prefer composition over inheritance") is telling.

However, I would say that the claim of "broken concept" is based not on one single argument, but on independent converging lines of evidence.

Here's another one, which again is not convincing by itself, but adds to the picture: the Curry-Howard isomorphism. One of the signs that you know you've found something interesting is that it turns out to be formally equivalent to something else that's interesting. (Think of the isomorphism between regular languages and DFAs, for example.)

Programming language theorists have found many such isomorphisms over the last few decades, and what's interesting is that programming language features seem to be equivalent to interesting objects in logic and category theory. For example, Scheme-style continuations are actually Pierce's Law in logic. Call-by-value and call-by-name turn out to be dual in the programming language which is isomorphic to Gentzen's classical sequent calculus.

Subtype relationships are pretty well-understood, and interface inheritance has a straightforward interpretation (e.g. see Haskell's typeclasses). However, despite searching for decades, nobody has found any such connections with implementation inheritance.

The industry desperately needs the style of OO that everyone uses to be on a sound theoretical footing, because it makes program analysis and compilers better. Lots of smart people have tried. The fact that we haven't found it by now strongly suggests that it's not theoretically sound.

It's bloated and unreadable due to C++'s template syntax.

I'm with you on the syntax issue. The greatest weakness of C++ is also its greatest strength: it retains something very close to backwards-compatibility with C. That inevitably means that all the good syntax is taken.

However, "bloated" is a puzzling claim. The whole point of the STL is that you can do things like type "sort" and it chooses the best sort algorithm for the data structure (e.g. merge sort for lists, quick/heap sort for vectors) automatically at compile time. Or you can create an array of 1000 elements, and it will initialise it with object construction or memset depending on the type, and this is all handled for you automatically at compile-time. You do not pay a cost to do this at run-time.

Your homegrown lib can't do that.

Boost and the STL don't compete. In fact, most of Boost (e.g. Algorithm, Array, Circular Buffer, Container and of course Iterator, among many others) are designed with STL in mind.

I've said some slightly uncomplimentary things about Objective-C in this thread, but I do have to admit that it's one of the best compromises between "dynamic"/scripty languages and "static"/low-level languages that has yet been developed.

It's just a shame that it's also based on Simula's broken object model.

Yeah, I didn't word that well. What I meant is, C++ is better than Objective-C because it isn't an OO superset of C.

It's a nice thought, but I've been fooled before about Presidential candidates. Pretty much every time.

As part of his re-patriation agreement, he should require cameras to be rolling throughout the entire trial with a live uncensored feed available to any organization that wants it (News organizations, EFF, ACLU, etc). If the government shuts down the cameras for any reason, then the agreement is null and void and the USA guarantees his return to Russia.

I wonder if the cameras could detect Snowden being whispered to that unless he plead guilty, his parents would have an unfortunate traffic accident in 6 months.

From past experience, we can be pretty sure that nothing could be so damning as to make the American people stand up and genuinely hold the criminals accountable. So seriously, what do they care?

The real problem is, is that his whistle blowing makes him a traitor.

It might open him up to the legal definition of treason in the eyes of the U.S. government, but not to the real definition of treason.

You are already guaranteed a right to a fair trial. It's not something that the AG can "add to" or deny.

Guantanamo Bay says differently.