Me either. But those privacy concerns you mention are such a huge deal that I try very hard to never send email to a gmail address. And when I have to send email to one, I say as little as I can possibly get away with.

I don't believe there exists any place in the nation where your only choice for internet service is AOL. There are many other dialup providers that are a local phone call from pretty much everywhere.

The lack of broadband doesn't explain the use of AOL at all. Why aren't people using a better ISP?

"Yes, but back in 1993 its not like you could just Google it."

No, but you could find local ISPs in the phone book. AOL has always been for two kinds of people: those who live someplace that had no ISPs, and those who wanted their hands to be held when they were doing that scary "online" thing.

It's the latter group that leads to aol.com email addresses being an indicator of someone who is clueless. Those people who started on AOL and actually learned stuff soon migrated to something better than AOL.

Of course it does. Is this even a question worth asking?

As others have said, by the people who wrote the language. And by the entire software industry as well. I was honestly surprised that anyone characterized C as a high level language. It's not just wrong (by the usual definitions of what low, mid, or high-level means) but is not the common understanding in the industry.

C++ is a high-level language, though.

Something is gained, though: self-documentation. The way you dereference a point (should) reflect what the pointer is being used for.

I do. I routinely use about a dozen different languages, but C++ remains my favorite by a longshot, followed closely by C.

Umm, no, it wasn't. It was (and is) considered a mid-level language, one step above assembler. High level languages of the day were things like COBOL and Fortran.

Just to be clear, I didn't say there were things that couldn't be done through web interfaces, just that they apparently can't be done nearly as well. This is entirely based on my experiences with both web-based and native application UIs. In the best web-based UIs I've seen, the problem is usually that they're annoyingly slow and/or laggy. Most web-based UIs have additional issues on top of that (formatting problems, etc.) All web-based UIs share other really annoying problems, like when transient network errors happen right after you push a button or enter some text.

They all also have the problem that they have to operate within a browser window, which severely constrains UI design.

Since the cloud is nothing more than a return to the bad old days of client/server computing, I think that this is more properly stated as "the entire industry has devolved".

I strongly disagree. 40% is an absolutely horrendous amount of overhead. Comparing that loss to old CPUs and the like to argue that it's not doesn't make any sense at all.

But that wouldn't solve the problem of having to use a web-based UI.

And user interface in general. I've yet to see a web-based UI that even comes close to being as good as a well-developed native one.

Not everyone. I, for one, think that the cloud is the exact opposite of great. No third party provider can be trusted, by law.