People said the same think when they were hearing about civil rights activists. And there is no such think as a local economy, at least not in the closed-system sense. Same with personal relations. The health and state of the nation affects everyone unless you live in a bunker in the Rockies or have so much money that all the daily shit is beneath you.

Knowing how to use smart pointers implies understanding their lifecycles. Same with raw pointers (which pretty much do not have a lifecycle.)

+1 for that one. One of my favorite cartoon episodes.

Depends on what type of smart pointer we are talking about (as many people have shot themselves in the foot with them). There is a reason why std::auto_ptr is deprecated.

One really, but really has to understand a smart pointer lifecycle before using it to solve problems that can typically solved with careful programming practices, tests and liberal usage of tools like valgrind.

Best comment I've seen in a long time. Kudos to you sir.

Stop using logic. Spew some diatribe about rights instead. That is how is done in /. (and 'MURIKA for that matter.)

As it should be.

You just answer it.

Companies themselves, as it is already done by industries that require vaccination (health industry comes to mind.)

If mandated by government, then government (and transitively us, taxpayers).

If mandated by employer, then employer (and transitively us, consumers). It should never be employees.

Only in 'MURIKA this is be rocket science.

Bingo. They shouldn't have a choice. If you have a job that potentially exposes you to hundreds of thousands of people a year (Disney qualifies, trinket store at strip mall does not), or a variety of pathogens (hospitals, clinics, food/animal processing plants) then that should not be a choice. Vaccination requirements should be a requirement as a function of exposition to traffic.

Anything else added to the argument is just ideology and "feelings".

Disney is not a public facility, but private property. Moreover, it is one where millions and millions of people from many different locations, all potential carriers of whatever, converge on a regular basis. So your analogy doesn't apply.

Furthermore, I would be very pissed if Disney workers are not vaccinated against, say mumps, or they are constantly exposed to flu and cold (as they would be) without protection, thus exposing my family to that on what is typically not a cheap trip.

Disney would be on the right to require some baseline vaccination (on its dime, not the employees' of course.)

Bro. Phantom Menace. Jar Jar Binks. Droids controlled from a single point of failure (even my non-technically inclined friends were like "wtf is that?"). You can't explain the hate of that away just by mere childhood nostalgia. That crap was awful in an absolute sense.

And neither was I (sans RoTJ).

Sorry, no. Phantom Menace can't be explained away. The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith were watchable as they portrayed Anakin's fall (sans the lingering doopey-doopey romance between emo-Anakin and hot-Amigdala and a whole bunch of other crap.)

But Phanton Menace was some utter crap that stained the other two, and Jar Jar Binks is like the dog turd that stains the sole of your shoe that doesn't come out no matter how much you scrape it on the grass.

You can't explain the utter fail of that to mere childhood nostalgia. You are crazy.

It is called making choices, and sometimes people chose the lesser of two evils. Last voting turnout was not the result of *choosing not to vote* from some intelligent decision making. It is more apathy driven by economics and the typical trends where people tend to vote more in presidential elections than in elections occurring in between.

This is a pattern that has occurred, quite consistently, through the years, independently of what party is controlling the white house or congress. There are quite a few reasons, many economic, for this.

To pretend that this was primarily or solely a vote-of-no-confidence-by-abstinence, that is just simplistic and disingenuous. It does make for an excellent bullshit talking point, though.

That'd be his job as a security professional. Corporate ethics is another role that is obviously necessary, but that is not the subject of IT/enterprise security. It would be a stretch (and a very disingenuous one) to make inferences about Schneie's ethics from his professional position in the matter (in the context of security) alone.

You will feel like shit when your good bacteria get nuked... but you do not die. You do die, however, with an untreated infection of MRSA, Bacillus anthracis, TMycobacterium tuberculosis, or even plain old Treponema pallidum (Syphilis) or Rickettsia (Typhus)

What was your point again?

I don't think it is an issue of the OP being against it as much as an issue of not knowing what the blubbery fuck the OP is talking about

Whether CS education is appropriate to all people who do computed-assisted technical work is very irrelevant to me since practical forces in real life simply solve that issue.

The problem I care about is a problem I seen in CS for real. I've met quite a few CS grads who don't know who Knuth, Lamport, Liskov, Hoare Tarjan, o Dijkstra are.

If you (the generic CS grad) do not know who they are, how the hell do you know about basic CS things like routing algorithms, pre and post conditions, data structures, you know, the very basic shit that is supposed to be the bread and butter of CS????

It is ok not to know these things and these people if you are a Computer Engineer, MIS or Network/Telecomm engineer (to a degree dependent on what your job expects from you.)

But if you are Computer Scientist, my God, this is like hiring an Electrical Engineer who doesn't know who Maxwell was. It does not inspire a lot of confidence, does it?

This is true, but it does not lead to what you are claiming. A data schema (in a very general sense that goes beyond relational schema or XML data schema or whatever) might or might not scale (either by poor design choice, or by design).

But that schema will depend on specific concepts and assumptions that will be best realized with a specific family of technologies (or even a single one.) It would be possible (but very hard and stupid) to try to implement a relational data schema with a document-oriented database. And it would be very painful to implement a flexible document-oriented system using a RDBMS.

A good design of each type of system would achieve most, if not all of the requirements desired for such a system, but they will make a significant number of platform and language support assumptions.

Design and architecture are not some ethereal things up in the clouds; they are meant to be rooted on very specific language and runtime constrains.

And since that is an undecidable problem, we know that will never occur (not without heuristics and constant human intervention, validation and verification.)

Yes, YOU have to work for it... using the appropriate levels of abstraction (be them run-times, frameworks, language features or any combination thereof.) Architecture and design are about constrains, about constraining the number of ways entire systems can be put into place within limited resources. That constrain alone dictates what language and platform features make architecture and design feasible.

I'm not sure what the OP intended by "constrain validation", so I would present my own interpretation. A constrain or set of constrains will indicate how much scalability or concurrency you need. Those constrains then become vital for describing the means for testing, validation and verification (after all, a requirement is only valid when it is testable and verifiable.)

I could architect a large-scale e-commerce site with strict fault-tolerance and consistency requirements. Great. Then, I can, in theory, implement it in assembler, or C... or with a higher-level language and platform.

Similarly, I can architect a distributed operating system. I could implemented in Java or natively compiled BASIC... or I could do it in C/C++.

Proper architectures for each problem will prescribe the constrains of the design (and the means for verification and validation), and each will be better served by specific languages and tools.

Any non-trivial architecture will have a direct dependency to a set of language features. And any set of language features will have a relation of economic feasibility to families of problem domains and related architectures.