... how on earth do they think they will not eventually get caught?

I realize that they dare not explicitly say that is what they are going to do, but once they are caught doing it, it will amount to exactly the same consequence as if they had.

Whether the insurance companies should be allowed to do that to you is the real root question which we need to answer.

Sure. Why not? Commercial drivers spend a *lot* more time on the road, so they're much more likely to need to call in the insurance. Non-commercial insurance is substantially cheaper.

Why should taxi drivers need commercial licenses either?

Higher standards? Many jursdictions ensure things like ahigher standard of driving, limited working hours, provision of adequate insurance, background checks for certain criminal activity and so on.

I like being able to buy a random electrical device and be reasonably sure because of regulations that it it nulikely to burst into flames. Likewise I like being able to order random taxis with good liklihood that I won't get a criminal, nuinsured, sleep deprived nutter.

Well that just sounds like mean-spirited carping. This for example is demonstrably not true:

And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed.

The committee process is very open and one can see how it works. and it doesn't work like that. And it certainly doesn't have every feature: most proposals get rejected.

Fortunately most C++ compilers use the EDG front-end to handle all the crap of template parsing.

Except the three most popular: GCC, LLVM and Visual Studio.

Really? I think the GOF should be round-up and shot. No other group has caused more harm to the industry.

Nope. I was trying t othink of an analogy but I'm stumped. The GoF wrote a nic book documenting ang giving standard names to a bunch of stuff people were already doing. It gave us a nice standardised vocabulary to talk about existing things. It was very much a descriptive book.

Then untoled nutcases decided it was *proscriptive* and used every bloody pattern they could remember in every piece of code. Blaming the GoF for that is like blaming wikipedia for someone losing a finger because they have an article on band saws.

What was lacking was the courage to drag programmers away from C rules and conventions enough to create a simple and powerful OO language.

lol

Lacking courage.

Don't foolishly insult the creator of the language with such historically ignorant and ill-thought out comments. There are hundreds of morbiund, obscure and unpopular languages for people who wanted to wean people off C. Nobody lacked the courage: hundreds of people have tried.

I'm sorry but the C++ committee has their head up their @$$es for *practical* matters:

Says the guy who doesn't understand the C++ committee. The C++ committee care very strongly about backwards compatibility, because so does everyon who uses C++. They also care very strongly about compiler adoption because, well, if the compilers don't adopt changes then no matter how much better it is in theory, it's worse than useless in practice.

* Standardized Name Mangling?

Would be nice, but would cause major backwards compatibility breakage because all but one compiler would have to change the magling scheme.

* Standardized ABI so compiler A can call code compiled with compiler B

Well, GCC won't adopt Microsoft's SEH, because they're slower. Microsoft won't adopt the Itanium ABI, because it would slaughter backwards compatibility and the faster exceptions aren't flexible enough to do what Microsft uses their exceptions for.

Secondly, if they'd mandated this, we'd have never got a huge boost in exception speed somehwere when gcc 3 came online.

But basically, it would be worthless because the compiler writers wouldn't adopt it. So why bother?

* Standardized error messages

Easy to ask for, almost impossible to specify. Do the error messages have to be in colour or is that optional? Besides it's foolish to claim they have their heads up their asses for not doing something that noone else has ever done.

* Standardized pragmas to enable/disable warnings for unused variables

What? Why?

* Standardized forced inline, never inilne

Again why?

* A consistent grammar between forward declarations and function definitions to make it easier to copy/paste

Nope. Never going to break backwards compatibility. Because no one would adopt the new standard.

* Multi-column debugging instead of the archaic line debugging

Outside the scope of the standard. Whine at your debugger vendor.

*"A Proposal to Add 2D Graphics Rendering and Display to C++"

The C++ committee have their heads up their asses because they discuss a proposal submitted acording to the correct procedure??

*For high performance games, most of the C++ features are *ignored* "CppCon 2014: Nicolas Fleury "C++ in Huge AAA Games"

So your argument against C++ is that it's used in one of the most competitive industries? You know, you don't have to use every langage feature in every project.

Yes, RAII is nice. But only *some* memory and resource leaks go away, basically the ones which are trivial, because allocation and deallocation simply follow lexical scope. Ofcourse, this is only trivial in languages which do not have exceptions. Exceptions make this simple thing very complicated, and without RAII it is indeed almost impossible to avoid resource leaks in C++. But without exceptions, it is not so much of a deal. In other words, RAII had to be invented after the fact to make exceptions usable in C++ because - again - some feature were introduced without much thought.

That is complete and utter rubbish: you completely misunderstand RAII. shared_ptr escapes lexical scope and is reference counted. Provide you never have cyclic mutable graphs, you are *guaranteed* not to leak resources with RAII.

for now perhaps. In time it will be:

What OS do you run?
SystemD.
Favourite browser?
SystemD.
Text editor?
Oh they never got that working but everything else has been removed so I just cat > file.txt I mean sure it's a usability regression for regular users, but apparently the distribution builders love it because they don't have to worry about packing editors.

I'm not actively campaigning against them, I just don't see all that much point.

The efficiency of individual appliences is governed by how well they're built. I don't see how the ability to switch on and off at certain times would come into it. There's already a huge drive for high efficiency appliances, if you go to any store selling them you're beset with all sorts of efficiency claims. The smaller kit doesn't hold up all that well. Apart from not being able to buy appliances with a hot water feed (this is annoying---why can't I use cheap gas heated water?), the thing that tends to dominate water heating is whether I have guests staying or not. Either way though, I don't think gas boilers particularly benefit from small size. It's off most of the time, so when I have guests, the duty cycle is higher.

As for running when one is out, or at certain times: you've been able to buy appliances with timers built in for years to be able to accomodate such things. A house I used to live in had an integrated washer-dryer. I would set it to come on at 2am, and it ran overnight with neither of the residents noticing and one would wake up to fresh clothes. The next place I lived in that had cleaning appliances, I usually hit "go" right before heading off to work or out otherwise. The effect was much the same.

When it comes to differential pricing: yes that is a possibility, however we already have that to some extent. Night time electricity prices are cheaper and so if you wish to engage in such things, you can switch to the "Economy 7" tarriff and have all the heavyweight appliances run when power is cheapest.

Personally, I don't bother because my central heating is gas, so I don't have any super heavyweight appliances which can be run at night.

There are certain applicances which could have some fuzz in the switch on time, more or less anything with an operating range, such as temperature. On the other hand once it falls outside the range, it has to be switched on, and averaging that over 10,000 heaters which willall be at random offsets might not have much difference.

Perhaps for very transient loads, they could be switched off to accomodate.

And of course electric car chargers fit right in.

However, at this point it's less "internet of things" and more "internet of select heavy appliances". Not all heavy appliances need apply. An electric kettle for example despite drawing more than almost any other plug in appliance (3kW), is something that needs to be run on demand and is also very cheap. Other heavy hitters are cooking and power showers, both of which are also completely on-demand and wouldn't fit in.

At this point it's less IOT and more "smart grids", which certainly have benefits too. They also have downsides, for example without extreme care, control systems can cause oscillations. With too much latency and lag between appliances smartly switching on and off it would easily be possible to introduce instabilities. I think that's where quite a lot of the research is.

FWIW smart grids do seem like a much more reasonable thing to me. They're also much more limited. Because they are usually limited ot heavy appliances, there can be strict regs on what gets to go in them. With a bit of care, smart grids could allow replacement of some peaking stations with baseload ones. I think electric cars mesh well into this because they cnd their chargers can act as grid buffers if they can donate some power back. That's one of the few feasible ways of introducing grid scale battery storage.

I'm not against smarter devices (hell, that's my day job at the moment), or internet connectivity. But an awful lot of the IoT hype is amazingly faddish and appears to me to be utterly pointless. Being able to check the news from my fridge door? lame. Being able to check the status of my dryer from work? Even more lame.

Hahah! Me too. These threads are fun and I'm not going to sit around quietly while people claims that somehow social justice is a bad thing.

Pretty much anyone not being a mysoginistic asshole on these threads gets modded troll. Somehow the MRAs/RedPiller's have got a whole load of mod points.