Good C++ is just as fast as good C, and easier for the programmer to optimize. Compiler optimization is on the same level. C++ even allows some interesting things like zero-cost error handling that is actually impossible in C.

The Windows kernel APIs are all C, there is no C++ in it. You can use a subset of C++ that doesn't require runtime support, but it is unsupported.

Linus hates C++ for a lot more reasons than ABI, and the majority of them are completely uninformed and show a lack of C++ experience.

All the understandability and maintainability worries people have about C++ in the kernel would be easily controlled by standard patch review. Don't like giant template metaprograms? Don't accept the pull request. That easy. Perhaps one of the valid reasons to keep C++ out of the kernel right now is purely that Linus would be unable to review such patches with authority.

Even simple things like classes, RAII, basic templates, and exceptions would do wonders for development.

My workplace gets regular audits from our clients, usually every 3-24 months depending on how big/paranoid the client is. JP Morgan Chase is one of them.

We could tell the audit this summer was a bit different. It took about twice as long and went into much more detail than usual specifically regarding our tech side. After the audit, we got an unexpected list of demands related to stopping leaks.

Now, we don't handle sensitive financial information for them, so it's possible they were just trying to cover all their bases and we got stuck with security theater. Irritatingly, everyone in IT immediately recognized that the demands wouldn't actually prevent leaks. When you have a company full of employees who regularly use FTP, email, and even dropbox to send files to clients, you're simply not going to be able to prevent it.

After months of back and forth trying to kill some of the more ridiculous demands -- like blocking access to Gmail, which we use for company email -- they simply wouldn't budge. We've been wondering why they're standing so firm about it, and now it all makes sense.

he trouble with CloudFlare is, if you want to stay anonymous on the internet using Tor, you're SOL, as they serve you captchas every 3 pages when they see a connection coming from a Tor exit node.

This feature can be easily turned off in their settings. It is part of their security features.

I'd love to see more people using Tor, but the experience has to change a lot before we can do that.

Being anonymous and secure on Tor is not easy. It's a major inconvenience to disabling browser features like Javascript, and it requires firm behavioral changes from the user.

Putting a mainstream user into the same environment is simply not going to work.

They tried, but were having trouble finding a 458 that could transform into a 360 and back in the blink of an eye.

(The dash they flash to while accelerating was a Ferrari 360, not the 458 he was driving)

A thousand times this. It's been shown that ~192K VBR from a modern encoder is transparent to our ears, so these 256K or higher bitrates are the worst of both worlds: it's not lossless AND it's a waste of bandwidth.

I've seen kids wearing Minecraft backpacks and shirts, said something like "hey cool! what're you building right now?" only to discover that while they've heard of the game they haven't actually played it.

I suspect these paraphernalia stand to make a lot more money than the game does.

As far as coming out with sequels, I'm not sure how well that would work anyway. Minecraft prides itself on being extremely basic, letting the player provide the creativity. What could a sequel possibly provide that didn't do away with that premise?

Anyway. Worth 2.5 billion? Highly doubtful, especially looking at the lackluster response to anything non-Minecraft they've brought out.

But it sounds like optimizing left turns is what actually improved traffic.

Bitcoin itself doesn't have any known security flaws. One usability issue is that you can't instantly guarantee a transfer of coins -- nobody is going to be buying coffee with it directly.

It's not so much about problems with Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin "banks" that turned out to be incredibly insecure. The banks were created to exchange paper money for Bitcoins, and to facilitate instant transfers. They just happen to be incredibly bad at it, and because there is no regulation like an actual bank, are pretty much free to be as bad as they want.

Paypal is actually a good fit, as Bitcoin is essentially a decentralized Paypal. Paypal is also pretty well known for the same evils as they aren't regulated like an actual bank either, but they've got a lot of infrastructure and experience that could make them a far better Bitcoin bank than what's available right now.

Car franchise laws were put in place to protect dealerships. Car manufacturers did not want to put in the heavy local investment to sell cars in every area, and dealerships did not want a manufacturer swooping in to steal the business with lower prices once the areas started booming.

AviSynth is extremely versatile and often leads in state-of-the-art filters long before any other video editor gets them, including professional ones. The trick is that there's no UI for it -- to edit videos, you write scripts.

Office Automation is problematic -- because it literally opens up a hidden window of your Office app and simulates clicking around the UI to do what you need, if something unexpected happens it can unhide the window to show the user a message. This might be good enough for a desktop app, but if you're running it on a server it'll just freeze up your process with noone there to click it.

For Office->PDF conversion of word docs, Aspose.Words has a fairly easy API and generally very accurate rendering. I highly recommend it.

At least on the C# side of things, the three libraries I've used (iTextSharp, PdfSharp, and Aspose.Pdf) are all a bit of an unintuitive mess with inconsistencies all over the place and very little documentation. In the case of iText, their revenue stream is putting all their documentation into a book for people to buy, so it's not uncommon to get an intentionally vague response when asking for help.

I cycle between each depending on what I need to do, because they all have their own quirks and supported features. I've even piped from one to another to get certain parts of the process working.

Good luck.

Well, I never said Bose actually had quality, only that people perceive them as having it. I carefully worded it like that because while I agree with you, it was not the point I was trying to make. I'll stick to my Mad Dogs and DT880s.