As an ex (Aussie) taxi driver I can tell you that the rules are enforced by the transport cops who patrol the streets doing spot checks on trucks, cabs, and busses. There are heavy fines for both driver and owner, tampering with a sealed meter is considered fraud and can attract jail time. Small yellow lights on the top of the cab tell the cops what rate the meter is charging. Taxi's are also cleaned twice a day and can be put off the road by the transport cops if they are dirty. But hey, if you want to pay 50% more for "freedom" and risk being sued by an insurance company when it turns out the uber driver doesn't have the right insurance, it's your choice.

In what way? The driver in either situation is much more likely to be attacked than the passenger? No physical protection or panic button in an uber car.
What do you do when the driver starts yelling at you for enforcing the rate card?

You video him with your phone and send the footage to the transport cops. Uber is an illegal scam on uber drivers, desperate people who ignore the insurance risk and run their own car into the ground trying to make a quick buck. Sad truth is they won't make enough to cover the cost of maintenance and fuel, they will end up still desperate but with no car to live in when they can't pay the rent. Courier companies here have already done the same thing to drivers, a rusty shitbox with a "courier" sign slapped on the side is a common sight here in Melbourne. I don't want to see that happen to our (already underpaid) cab drivers, I think uber and companies like it should be shut down, if they are allowed to continue it will be a very fast race to the bottom as the market is flooded with desperate people in rusty shitboxes with the word "taxi" hand painted on the door.

tl;dr - If you want a hair raising third world taxi experience to be the norm, then keep using Uber.

I recently visited "The Kimberly", it's one of the hottest places on Earth, the well water is pumped into a water tower for pressure where it sits in the tropical sun all day. It's impossible to have a cold shower, if you get up first in the morning there is about 30 seconds of cool water from the underground pipes before the ~32deg C tank water comes thu.

Not sure who it was but a physicist showed that; if you model US income by assuming that everyone has a pile of money and everyone goes out for a few hours a day and throws/catches random amounts at each other based on the size of their pile, the resulting income distribution mirrors that of the US population as a whole. Further, it does not matter how much each individual starts with, the same result occurs even if all piles are all equal at the start.

A pedantic compiler is all you need.

True, and some will interpret your post to mean you are not worthy, but what makes you think you, or the state, have the wisdom to decide who should live and die?

That excuse could fly

Troll food" - Dance troll. Dance I say!

Yeah right, tell that to the people of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Manchester, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, etc, etc, the only reason Paris was spared was because Hitler valued the architecture and wanted to keep it intact.

Even the most bloody wars (such as the English civil war) kill less than 5% of the population, OTOH the black plague regularly killed ~50% or more of the people in the cities/regions it infected. People who survived the plague had a brief period of high living standards due to all the abandon property lying around.

As a science based "greenie" my "agenda" is to be a part of a sustainable, peaceful, disease free species. Wars, plagues, and mass starvation are what I want to avoid. Science and common sense tell me that the main factor in obtaining what I want (for my 3 grandkids) is population. There's plenty of evidence we can achieve humane population control by educating and allowing women to control their bodies, and providing security of living standards in old age.

Or we can continue to behave like fermenting yeast, expanding to consume our available resources and killing each other for access to untapped/unguarded resources (territory, water, food). AGW is the #1 mid (and long) term threat on the pentagon's list of threats to global stability and it has been that way for almost a decade. The reason is that AGW will dramatically change the current (territory, water, food) map, and it will do so this century - even if we all stop emitting GHGs today.

Syrian civil war - Canary in the coal mine? - "There is evidence that the 20072010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."

The four Galilean moons are interesting from an evolutionary POV.
Io - Molten sulphur on the surface, purple volcanoes all over it.
Europa - Deep water ocean, thin crust, very active plate tectonics.
Ganymede - Europa with a deep dish crust and cooler core.
Callisto - A rock.

So it would seem that gas giants may have their own "goldilocks zone" when they are orbiting in the colder regions of their host system. So the "average" solar system may have 3-4 "habitable zones" rather than just one.

Yes, the people who push Homeopathy and other forms of medical voodoo are also very likely to fuck with the victims mind, the aim of the brainwashing is make sure the victims avoid real doctors and keep coming back. The well known skeptic James Randi lost his father to one of these charlatans.

..don't approve, I'm off to the pet shop to buy a giant anteater before they are sold out!

Aliens with gigantic neutrino cannons is the obvious answer.

Having said that, chaotic systems are often statistically very stable, mathematically a stable non-linear system is known as a strange attractor, a strange attractor is always a fractal. The golden ratio pops up in all sorts of fractals, especially spirals.
It's said that our own sun has at least two internal spiraling magnetic fields that "wind themselves up into knots" for the peak of the 11yr sunspot cycle. Who said it I don't recall, but it wasn't the "electric universe" guy. ;)

Aside from effort and portability, it doesn't really matter what language(s) or framework(s) you use to get the job done. A basic understanding of the algorithms and concepts that have emerged from computer science and logistics over the last ~80yrs is the secret to being a "good" programmer, consistently knowing where, when, and how to apply them is the secret to being a "top-notch" programmer.

Understanding pointers is key to unlocking the power in C. There's nothing mind boggling about your buggy example, what you are trying to demonstrate is not a flaw, it's actually a very powerful feature. Having said that, I do agree that most people have trouble grasping the concept of pointers, I used to teach C to 2nd year engineering students, only about one in 10 students "got it" on the first try. If you want a better handle on pointers (bad pun intended), I highly recommend K&R's classic text "The C programming language".

I also agree with TFA that STL and Boost are over engineered libraries that overwhelm even an experienced C++ programmer with indecipherable typedefs within typedefs, proving yet again, that just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be.

(x+y)+z != x+(y+z); - correctly evaluates to false in C, the parentheses can safely be ignored because they are redundant and make no difference to the outcome.
x = x++; is basically undefined - How so? The code increments x, the "x=" part is harmless, again you are using redundant code that any halfway competent C programmer would not write in the first place.
I've been making a good living from C/C++ for 25yrs, I don't see your "problems", and I can't imagine the "workarounds" to be anything other than removing the redundant syntax.

As for TFA - It's unsurprising that Linus rants about C++, sure he's a very smart guy, but he's also an arrogant and highly emotional attention whore who wants things done his way or not at all. When he can't support his opinion with a logical argument, he invariably resorts to personal insults. Actually he often resorts to personal insults even when he can support his opinion.