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This is an excellent answer.

Here's a free marketer's take on Umair Haque's article:

Harvard Business Review Goes Gaga over Karl Marx

If so then you're not really using RAII.

A) Yes, you can avoid sharing references, and that might use more memory than is necessary, but then again, for a specific problem you may not need copies and so it could be efficient.

B) Nice absolute there. Reference counting is a fine solution in many situations.

There are other solutions as well:

C) Use a non-reference counting smart pointer that allows resources to be passed around safely with no copying and no other overhead. See std::unique_ptr.

D) Share references in a well defined way such that they're never passed outside the scope where the object is accessible.

What happens is that the resource is freed as required because you're using RAII.

As a matter of fact revenue is unquestionably greater than the interest payments. So I assume they're still a long way from worrying if there's enough revenue to cover interest.

Why are you suggesting that the only two choices are to borrow money or to not pay anything back? Are you sure there's no other choice?

The people talking about default are using it as a scare tactic, and it would be their choice to default or not, regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised or not.

Unless the revenue amounts to less than the payments on current debt then even in the case where they refuse to take on more debt they still have the income to make those payments and avoid a default.

So it might be better to say:

Software patents, and in fact all patents, are one of those 'fetters' on capitalism, not part of capitalism. Intellectual property, such as it is in unfettered capitalism, is entirely enforced in contracts and keeping secrets secret.

You're right, he did build it therefore he really should know better than to make such foolish comments. But since he apparently doesn't know better I too hope he's reading Slashdot so he can read the grandparent's correction.

I think Z00L00K was saying the time for code reviews is after all the automated stuff already checks out. Obviously you shouldn't waste co-workers' time reviewing code that you already know needs more work.

Or maybe NAT could be replaced by firewalls on consumer routers.

You don't need NAT to prevent that. Either use a firewall or just make sure access to your home automation uses authenticated access.

You shouldn't be accessing them by IP address. You should be accessing them by service instance name, and that's under your control (and has reasonable, human readable, factory set defaults). Zeroconf takes care of the details of figuring out the hostnames and IP addresses for you.

Not the way Rand defined it. If you're donating to a charity that you think does good work then she'd call it self interest. The recompense for the donor would be that the charity is able to do more of the work the donor thinks is good.

As I understand her definition, basically anything that promotes whatever an individual values is 'self-interest.' If you understand the definition she's using it's easy to see why she'd see being altruistic as evil, because by her definition is basically wasting resources on things that are worthless, or destroying something that's valuable for no good reason.

You know, the whole thing about what Randroids say about altruism and self-interest Randroids, is the result of them defining altrusim and self-interest differently.

They'd use the term 'altruism' to describe hurting a loved one because someone you don't know or care about wants them hurt. They call it 'self-interest' when an empathetic person gives money to a total stranger in need.

The references to God aren't really necessary to the argument. It might as easily begin "We take these truths to be self evident," but whether the source of the rights is taken to be God or something else, as long as the existance of the rights Bastiat posits is accepted then the argument should hold together.

Nor is anarchy necessary. In fact The Law points out that as long as law is restricted to its rightful purpose the form of government is immaterial. (Of course, as a practical matter the form of goverment is important because the different forms have different characteristics in terms of how likely they are to try to restrict law to its rightful purpose and to what injustices they are prone.) So it may seem like it's advocating anarchy, since it places an outer boundry on law (which has probably been far exceeded by every nation ever) and only gives passing reference to an inner boundary, but I don't think it's incompatible with other forms of governance.

In this case I don't think there's really a problematic dichotomy between laws that permit the use of force to keep some information secret and laws that mandate some information not be held secret. It's true that in some cases they are mutually exclusive and that one might identify the law taking neither side as anarchy, but I think it's an invalid equivocation to take the improbability of complete anarchy (the law remaining silent on every issue) as an argument against the law remaining silent on one particular issue. And that's what makes The Law important, it tries to identify and argue for a particular conception of when laws are okay, and on what issues the law should remain silent, leaving the advancement of those issues to institutions other than force.

On that note, I recomend reading the whole thing, because the arguments rely and build on each other. It's longer than a typical article, but it's a really tiny book. Perhaps a kindle version would make the read more comfortable. However here are some sections that I think contain particularly relevant or important conclusions and bits of the argument: "What is Law?" "How to Identify Legal Plunder" (when he talks about taking things that belong to someone, don't think in ephemeral terms like 'information,' instead think in concrete physical terms such as 'the book in which a novel mathematical proof has been written,' or 'the money of a fine levied against someone refusing to publish source'), "Law Is Force," "Law Is a Negative Concept," and "Law and Charity Are Not the Same"