Yeah, that confuses me too. He thought no-one would subscribe? So why did he do it exactly?

Well, I think we can thank our lucky stars that copyright law wasn't around when the bible was written (not to mention modern life support technology)... I can just imagine the apostles and paul, kept in some kind of cryogenic pseudo-life state in the basement of the vatican, their hearts beating once a month a so, so that the vatican can keep collecting royalties on the bible ad infinitum...

Sure, but the point the original poster is trying to make is, when you're running more than a thousand servers to support your app, maybe it's worth thinking about optimization. Wouldn't you agree?

Additionally, you take a performance hit using the STL because stl classes have virtual method lookup tables.

Well, here you show that you form and express opinions even when you don't know what you are talking about. The whole point of Templates is the work gets done at compile time, not at runtime. no vtables.

As for your benchmarks, STL has nothing to do with windows, so I don't understand why you want to prove anything to windows wienies wrt to the STL. But your psychological picaddiloes are your business. More than likely though your benchmarks are foolish.

Since you don't understand how the STL works (i.e. you think it is based on inheritence and vtables, which is wrong), you probably used it badly. So that's an obvious potential source of skew in your benchmarks. Secondly, I could easily write a benchmark that would make my hand code beat the STL, or write code that beats an STL implementation for a given benchmark. That doesn't say anything about the real world performance however. The STL provides wonderful results for a wide range of applications, but it doesn't neccisarily provide the ideal solution for a particular problem. It's a wonderful tool, and if you know how to use it correctly, it will provide you wonderful benifits in your code. I personally would never hire a programmer who is unwilling to use, and unwilling to learn how to use the STL.

B. Stroustrup agrees that String class isn't perfect, as a result of trying to be very general, but I would still think carefully before rolling my own string class. But you don't have to use the string class to use the STL.

You don't need to be reading TR1, as you clearly aren't unerstanding it. I would suggest Scott Meyers "Effective STL" if you're interested in correcting this glaring shortcoming in your C++ expertise. If you don't understand the STL please don't call yourself a C++ programmer.

I agree with you about java though.

People seem to be missing the point of the OP.

If you're goal is to get a prototype, or low demand app out the door quickly, PHP is a much better choice than C++. But if you're a mega user like Facebook or google, maybe it becomes worthwhile to handcode custom containers, even do a little assembly, etc, focusing on machine efficiency rather than development efficiency. How can you tell whether this would be a good investment? Look at how many servers you could shut down: monetary savings, plus it's good for the environment.

Whether or not the original posters estimate is a good one, may be open to debate (although in my experience his estimate is conservative wrt to performance improvements). It's interesting food for thought though, and should be investigated further by large scale operators like Facebook, Google, Amazon...

This isn't a copyright claim (the headline is completely wrong). It's a trademark claim. Copyright is a TEMPORARY restriction to free speech to encourage creative works. Even though Disney et al have been expanding copyright lengths to keep from returning their copyrighted material to the public domain (where it belongs), copyright lengths are still less than a hundred years. So even if they wanted to, they couldn't make a copyright claim on stuff that's more than a thousand years old. Trademarks are a different story.

The distinction between copyright, trademark, and patent law is important in todays information wars.

This is a badly moderated post. It's not informative, since everyone knows this by now. I'd moderate it funny and insightful, but not informative.

I'm annoyed by the mantra:

Competition drives innovation and provides consumer choice. Finding ways to better use existing assets, including Universal Service, rights-of-way, spectrum, and others, will be essential to the success of the plan. The limited government funding that is available for broadband would be best used when leveraged with the private sector.'

Blech. Sometimes free markets and competition are the best way to accomplish a social goal. Sometimes they aren't. In particular, rural and poor neighbourhoods, which would profit most from broadband and are most poorly served under the current system, and I don't see shovelling money at providers doing much for that goal. I'd rather see that money used to address the most poorly served areas of the country, and provide some public competition to private provider plans.

Of course profiting off someone else's work is unfair.

That's an interesting assertion. I completely agree that profiting off of other people's work is pretty much the foundation of capitalism. Note that capitalism and free-market economy are not equivalent terms in this context. But every variation of "putting your capital to work" boils down to profiting off of the work of others, by virtue of having a capital advantage. I also agree that capitalism as a religion (which, imho, is the norm in the U.S., and the de-facto basis of the Republican party) is a pretty bad idea with very harmful characteristics.

But does that mean that profiting off of someone else's work or innovation is unfair? I have to disagree most strongly. Profiting off of others innovation and work is the single thing that makes civilization, science, art, and technology possible. Remember Newton? "If I have seen farther than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". If we didn't profit off of other peoples work, whether that be creative work or manual labor, we wouldn't get anywhere. Every one of us would have to re-create language, the ability to make fire, learn how to make simple tools, and figure out how to feed and shelter ourselves. Hardly a desirable direction to take.

In all of these discussions about copyright violation, patent violation, or trademark infringement, I think it's a tricky issue to determine what is "fair". Honestly, the word "fair" is just a little to ephemeral and subjective to be used productively in such conversations. When we discuss the ethics and practice of copyright, trademark or patent law, the question has to be whether or not the issue at hand profits society.

In the world today, anyone who claims that such "IP" laws are working, are in the best interests of society, are "fair", is either a deeply interested party, or is not thinking clearly. It is precisely with the intent of muddling the thoughts of observers that the interested parties start bandying about phrases like "intellectual property theft". It introduces a linguistic hook to our cultures deeply rooted, emotionally charged concept of personal property.

When discussing such things though, don't think it's a good idea to make claims like "If the world were "fair" every single human would have as an inalienable right free access to decent food, housing, healthcare, and security and working beyond that would be an optional choice to better their life.". This may be a worth ideal to strive for, but I don't think it's relevant to the issue at hand, and helps people pigeonhole those of us who work for copyright and patent law reform as "pinko hippie idealists", or some variant on that theme.

What I feel very comfortable calling "unfair", in that it is inequitable, is our tendency to forget that everything we have is built on the work of others, and that the best way to progress society is keep on building on others work. Making a temporary delay in the time it takes for a creative work to enter the public domain is probably a good idea socially speaking. But the laws governing this borrowing from the public domain must always into account the cost to the public domain. In the case of copyright law, the problem is the length of the copyright. In the case of patent law, length is probably an issue, but breadth is the real problem.

Come now. Cut with the "CHINEZE ARE TEH EVILZ!" crap. If you want to point fingers at other nations and go around spreading your brand of Democracy (tm) then make sure you get it right first.

I quite agree. Pointing fingers at oneself can be productive. Pointing fingers at others is usually just a way to self-deception. I always liked what Einstein said, i.e. "I think the only way to teach another is by example, even if it's an example of what not to do".

Despite the fact that it's Microsoft doing the crime, the crime is not theft, the crime is copyright violation. In this case it's copyright violation with the intent for commercial gain, and directly impacts the victim in more ways than the usual denial of revenue stream, so I'm sure other crimes apply.

But copyright violation != theft. Theft denies the original owner use of the good being stolen. It's important to distinguish between the two ideas as the two crimes have different impacts on society, are covered by different laws, and their enforcement have different social impacts.