The other thing governments should not do is mandate software or other purchases of specific things from specific companies.

The government currently would require me to buy health insurance if I didn't already have it. I looked at my options. There's something like seven insurance companies in direct competition, and if an eighth came up with a way to sell it cheaper they'd be welcome. No problem.

If I have to use IE, or Microsoft Office, to use government services or connect with the government, I'm being legally required to buy a certain product from a certain company. If another company wants to butt in with something cheaper, they can't.

You can dodge a company,

Really? I'd love to know how to get a low-latency and reasonably reliable net connection over 6Mb/s without involving Comcast.

In the case of natural monopolies (like anything that involves running something to individual houses), having a single regulated company has been shown to work well. That's how I get phone service, electrical power, and natural gas. The water and sewer connections go to city facilities. I have almost no problems with any of that.

Why shouldn't a town do its own fiber network? It's not going to be as complicated as water and sewer systems. Why not hire a company to do it? In what way is it more complicated than phone service?

When competition can work, a free market is generally the best way to arrange things. When there are really big barriers to entry, and massive waste if competition does occur, a regulated monopoly is the way to go.

Interesting post. First you claim that I'm wrong in saying that, in Java, some data types are stack-only and some are heap-only. Then you claim that object types are heap-only and primitive types are stack-only.

Basically, I'm trying to figure out what sort of reasoning got you to think that RAII objects are stack-based only. One common confusion for people who write Java and C# is that C++ has no concept of stack- and heap-based data types, and I was wondering if you were confused by that. Evidently, I was wrong, since you are correct on how those types work. You are wrong in thinking I don't know about storage classes, of course. (Also, we're not going to get anywhere with claims of C++ expertise. I assumed your expertise was on a par with the accuracy of your claims.)

Because I'm annoyed, I'm going to point out that function arguments can also be moved, not copied, in some cases, and that your use of "auto" is not only obsolete (in C++) but also highly idiosyncratic. The committee decided "auto" could be repurposed because approximately nobody ever used it as a keyword, based on a very large survey of source code.

And where did you get that thing about putting "static" on function arguments? "static" can be used on member variables and functions (meaning they're class-based and not tied to any object), non-class variables (giving them static storage duration), or it can be used to specify internal linkage. It's not something that goes on function arguments.

Where did I learn C++? Primarily on the job over fifteen years ago, supplemented by reading extensively. I'm not claiming to be a real expert, but I do have reasons behind what I say.

In what sense is a DatabaseConnection not an RAII object? Assuming the constructor allocates the connection, and the destructor gets rid of it, it's an RAII object. It's frequently true that the destructor is at the end of a block, but it could also be due to being owned by another object that deletes it on destruction, or it could be explicitly deleted itself. The Wikipedia article expressly notes (in the third paragraph) that RAII doesn't have to be scope-based. I'm not making this up myself. If I were to do something like "static shared_ptr foo; ... foo = make_shared(new DatabaseConnection);" I'd get an object that allocates on construction, deallocates on destruction, and has nothing to do with the stack.

So, where do you get this idea that an RAII object has to be on the stack? It's new to me, and I've done quite a bit of reading and seen all sorts of opinions.

In a universe where people get afraid. If I'm the toughest guy in town, and have some friends, I can keep the town under my thumb, with everybody afraid to attract my attention in any way. Cause great anguish to those who oppose me, and few individuals will oppose me. It's worked before on various scales.

I would counter with morality is not religion. And religion is not morality.

So you're saying that your specific sense of morality should be generally accepted? Many people have religious beliefs, and they generally influence their morality. It's no stranger than taking one's morality from a set of rules thought up by a science fiction writer and largely used to construct interesting logical puzzles. Moreover, the rules applied to the robots, not the use people made of them, and the robot brains were nothing like anything I've seen or read about in real life.

Sometimes, also, people with weapons cause suffering and need to be stopped by other people with weapons. An Asimovian robot brain in charge of US strategy for WWII would simply have burned out, as both action and inaction would cause large numbers of humans to die. I do not consider weapons to be inherently good or evil, and believe that my moral opinion is as valid as yours. Indeed, I suspect it's considerably more widespread.

So, while I respect your morality, I see absolutely no reason it should govern F/OS software licenses in general.

Police have been known to cover up things they cannot legally do, by denying them, providing a thin veneer of plausibility, or just letting the city pay out a large sum of money later. For example, the police can come up with some excuse to arrest me. When I'm released a few hours later, it turns out my phone was accidentally broken, or it was dropped in the scuffle (which may not have actually happened) and lost, or something like that. My best move is to stream the video to someplace else out of the police's immediate control.

There aren't any rules about a "kill switch" because it hasn't gotten to that stage yet. There will be, and the police will doubtless violate them too.

If you can identify a phone well enough to brick it, you can identify it well enough to have the tower refuse non-911 calls. I haven't heard of that happening, either.

Yeah, but some variant of pay-by-click was the only way I could think of to make this work across the web. I'd love to hear a good alternative.

About two or three hours a week, during which we made real decisions and walked out with doable action items. That's the bureaucratic overhead we faced. I've seen worse when floundering on a strict waterfall project.

Last time I was involved in an agile project (using Scrum, more or less), we refactored some of the fundamental parts of the code base, coped well with changes (the hardware was being developed at the same time), came up with clean, maintainable code, always knew what we should be working on, and delivered an excellent product pretty much on schedule. It wasn't that we really knew what we were doing, we knew about Scrum and took the stuff that looked good.

Of the three developers involved, two of us had intimate knowledge of the code base, and the third knew a lot of the code base but wanted to get into some new stuff. That may have something to do with it.

That's still rather thin. I'd consider Dr. Dobb's a good source, but I'm not sure there's anything I'd consider a reliable secondary source on Wordpress. The github reference obviously belongs as an external reference if a page is created, but is a primary source. I don't know about the others myself. I also don't know if any of these have appeared since the page was created. Can you find three reasonably reputable secondary sources in there, or is it mostly blog postings from people who aren't all that notable?

As far as I've been able to figure, the main national actors that caused WWI were Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. France's only real role was egging Russia on, and Britain was pretty much absent in the process, merely being presented with a war they could join or not. All the discussion of British-German rivalry leading up to WWI being talked about as the cause amuses me.

Yeah, and make sure the Dr. Dobbs reference is in it. It sounds like there were only primary sources, which is against Wikipedia rules. ("No original research" is a terrible idea for many places, and an excellent rule for an encyclopedia.)

As far as deleting too soon goes, I'd say the page was created too soon. Provide just a few secondary references, and I bet it doesn't get deleted.