Cole's thesis is that Islamic law forbids terrorism. The bailey version of the argument is that this is somehow relevant to modern life. The motte version is that there is textual support for this prohibition.

Personally, I think he knows that he is engaging in a motte-and-bailey argument. Did you realize what he did when you cited him?

What made the Qt4 breakage "a necessary evil" but also prevented them from adopting remotely modern C++ principles at the same time? Why was that breakage good, but making it practical for developers to adopt standard C++ practices could, and can, be so lightly set aside?

The sad thing is that Qt people are probably going to remain stuck in a 1990s mindset about C++ as long as people like you are willing to make apologetics for their misdesigns.

Non-iterator types? In *my* C++? It's more likely than you think!

As you point out, Qt 4 broke source compatibility in a major way -- so obviously it is not the kind of showstopper you suggest it should be. I would propose using idiomatic C++ design approaches, rather than sticking to architectural decisions that made sense 20 years ago before there was much consistency between C++ compilers. Nowadays, there is no good reason to prefer QString over std::string or std::wstring (and many good reasons to prefer the latter), and the same applies to every Qt container type. The Qt idiom of pass-by-copy-on-write-value makes runtime performance hard to predict, requires care in multithreaded use (do all types implement COW in a thread-safe manner?), and is very much at odds with the standard C++ library. Qt's efforts to make things "just work" end up hiding build-time, storage and execution-time costs, making it hard to figure out how to optimize code.

As you say, it is not Qt's fault that C++ took so long to really be a cohesive, modern language -- but it is Qt's fault that it continues on as if the state of C++ were the same as it was 15 or 20 years ago.

I haven't looked at Qt 5 -- does it still insist on duplicating the STL except with a horrible naming convention and poorly justified design changes, making it painful to use any non-Qt C++ library?

The same universe as what? My argument doesn't rest on some idea of the way things used to be. What are you smoking that makes you think name-dropping NCLB or RTTT is a convincing argument? What does the current affordability of college have to do with whether standardized testing at the K-12 level helps charter schools? (For the record, I think an awful lot, and maybe a majority, of college degrees are currently overpriced, and students are suckers for taking out big loans to pay for them.)

Charters are judged -- even more harshly -- based on results of these standardized tests. The fact that there's a mechanism to set up charter schools when the public schools suck has nothing to do with the fact that governments have long tried to, and still do, push private schools into the margin. Government's efforts to do so make a mockery of the AC's claim that this social-media snooping debacle was caused by "the philosophy that the free market will be the best solution in every walk of life".

Why in the world do you think that standardized testing is good for, or inherent to, charter schools? Standardized testing long predates charter schools. Standardized testing -- and standardized curricula, which is what Common Core is really pushing -- are in many ways an antithesis to charter schools. Charter schools are successful to the extent that they can distinguish themselves from what their (public or private) competitors offer. If all schools have the same material and the same tests, and those mandated bits cover as much of the school year as Common Core says they must, then charter schools will have precious little to distinguish themselves with. Besides, charter schools are at best a hybrid between private and public education. They're good in that they generally let parents choose a school for their children, but bad in that they are much more accountable to the existing public-school bureaucracy rather than to parents.

The primary way that government has (very intentionally) pushed private schools to the sideline is by using fairly uniform taxes, usually in the form of property taxes, to pay for the public schools. Anyone who wants to send a child to a private school has, until the very recent phenomenon of school-choice vouchers, had to pay twice: Once for public schools, and once for the private school they choose for the child.

There are special needs kids who can't just click through a test on a computer screen -- blind children are an obvious example, and anyone with dyslexia needs special accommodations for the test to accurately measure skills beyond reading comprehension. Anything more complicated than a multiple-choice question -- for example, being able to get partial credit for showing work in a math or science problem, or any essay question -- tends to be very hard to grade by computer. Setting up computer-focused course materials takes extra work, and if that doesn't amortize over enough classes, it is wasted effort. How often does the course material need to be reworked, do to changes in the available hardware and software platforms? Does the computerized curriculum mean that schools in the inner city, rich suburbs, and rural areas all need to have their students follow the same curriculum, or is there any room to tailor to local needs and abilities?

There certainly is a lot of budget that is wasted or abused in public schools, and bureaucracy and teacher's unions contribute much to that, but good solutions are not always as simple as they seem from the outside. If they were, we'd see more success stories of how a plucky reformer (with backing from the right school board members or whomever else) was able to turn a failing school around and deliver improved results for notably less money.

What part of one level of government coercing another level of government to adopt new educational standards, and then both of them together working to select a contractor to do these extra things (that even the government realizes it's too incompetent to run on its own), all while pushing private schools to the sideline, reminds you of a free market?

That's a lousy analogy. A better analogy in this case would be that someone offended by apartheid took an axe to the bus, and after being arrested, ranted about the white people's plot to breed black people into Morlocks. Does that help clarify why Lumsdaine is such a counter-productive "activist"? His attempt was doomed to fail -- it would not stop either the military-industrial complex, or even the particular program he went after, but would put off practically everyone who disagreed with him and some of those who did agree with him.

Unless a state passes a right-to-work law (California has not), "closed shops" are allowed under Federal law and typically required by union contracts. A "closed shop" agreement means that employees must be union members at the time of hire, or must join the union within a certain period. To conform with the First Amendment, employees who do not wish to pay for the union's "extra" activities (beyond collective negotiation for their bargaining unit that the employee belongs to) can opt out of full union membership and pay a reduced rate for the union's representation. The reduction is almost never a big reduction, which might surprise people who know how much unions spend on political activity. Also, people who do opt out can no longer vote on what the union should negotiate for, and unions like to make them social outcasts, so there are strong incentives to not opt out.

Jimmy Hoffa was unavailable to comment for this story about the Teamsters' violent behavior and links to organized crime.

The money to pay for benefits will come out of the employee's paycheck one way or another. If the employer has to pay employees when they're not working, it means the employee's per-working-hour salary will be lower than it would be otherwise.

Drivers who would get "50% pay when ill" are probably not that likely to stay home, and most companies that have policies like that require a doctor's note when someone takes advantage of the policy (to deter people from abusing it). Making your employer part of your relationship with your doctor should be an option for the employee, not a requirement.

You do know that IEEE 754 defines, and two IBM mainframe architectures implement, decimal floating point formats and arithmetic, right? Some languages -- mostly to support financial applications -- provide data types that are defined in decimal floating-point terms.

Using these is uncommon, there are various tradeoffs for decimal floating point, and the values are encoded using bits, but the high-level semantics and in some cases hardware instructions are explicitly base 10.

We must prosecute Galileo -- the academic consensus is clearly against his nutty heliocentric ideas.

We must exterminate defective races -- the science is clearly in favor of Aryan supremacy.

We must take to the courts and prosecute anyone who dares to insult our religion^Wscience!