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Comment Re:Democracy is NOT freedom (Score 1) 326

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either government employees are magically more noble than the rest of humanity, or they are just as imperfect.

There is nothing magical about government.

Indeed, the only characteristic that sets a governmental organization apart from a non-governmental organization is that the governmental organization appropriates other people's resources against their will under threat of violence for noncompliance.

That is, yes, as you say, "such things seem to inevitably become some form of government", but that's because they start taking people's resources rather than convincing them to hand over those resources willingly; in short, you're saying that at worst, we could end up with government.

Comment Democracy is NOT freedom (Score 2) 326

Indeed, free software projects aren't even run as democratic organizations; rather, they are emergent hierarchies formed via the spontaneous participation of individuals.

Each person involved in free software chooses how to appropriate his own resources—that is, how to appropriate his own capital, including time, intellect, money, etc. Democracy, on the other hand, is about choosing how to appropriate someone else's resources, especially against that someone else's will, especially by threat of violence as punishment for noncompliance.

Democracy is no friend of freedom, and certainly no friend of free software.

Comment Re:The Compiler Knows... (Score 2) 102

returning anything other than an iterator from cbegin() is a gigantic misdesign

That's precisely the point, now isn't it...

You are begging the question; you are assuming the contract; you are programming by [implicit] convention—that which plagues dynamic typing.

That is to say, such informal programming tends to be practical in these cases, but don't confuse that practicality with correctness.

Comment The Compiler Knows... (Score 0) 102

auto... the compiler knows the type of MemVec.cbegin() so why should I need to repeat it?

You're not repeating it; rather, you're specifying it.

Specifying the type is establishing a contract for the following code. This can be very worthwhile.

Note how the scope of cit is now limited to its area of use.

Of course, you could have achieved the same by declaring the variable inside the for-loop; keep things looking simple via a local typedef outside the for-loop:

typedef std::vector::const_iterator CIT;
for (CIT cit = MemVec.cbegin(); cit != v.end(); ++cit) {
        if (LookForPatterm(*cit))
                return true;
}
return false;

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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