You did not answer my question. I asked "What are the patent issues with the C++ standard?". You answered that something one implements might infringe on someone else's patent, but that is irrelevant to the question.

What are the patent issues with the C++ standard? Please, cite a specific patent.

You do, to some degree. You trusted the Saab not to explode when you attempted to start it, for example. Trust is not a 0% or 100% thing, it's more complicated than that. When someone says they don't trust X, they really mean they don't trust X to do Y. That Y is important, if sometimes implied. You did not trust your Saab in many regards, but you did trust it in some regards. If you did not trust it in *ANY* regards, you wouldn't use it.

You seem to contradict yourself there. You cannot trust nobody but then trust somebody just enough to use something. My entire point was that non-zero trust was impossible when using anything you did not build yourself. A point you seem to agree with despite your protestations that you completely disagree.

You are trusting Slashdot with your username, your password, and the text you submitted in any comments or stories you may have written. If you do not use this username or password anywhere but here, (and good for you on that), then you are making the data you give them less valuable. That's a sensible thing to do, but you do trust them with that.

If you had zero trust in Slashdot, you wouldn't even give them that. They could, if they were malicious, alter your submitted posts to make you out to be a pathological monster vowing to murder a world leader and alert authorities of that country. Those authorities might not believe in the rule of law and send agents after you.

A far fetched example of course, which means you don't have to trust them very much, but it cannot be zero, or you wouldn't give them the little information you did.

You must trust some things some times with some data, or you can get no meaningful work done. Balancing that trust (the risk) with that data (the value) is what security is about. I put this data, that I just wrote, on this website, because it is low value and low risk. I wouldn't post here my social-security number because that would be high risk. I wouldn't post my private key here either, but I do store my private key on a hard drive I did not build myself nor did I verify myself running an OS I did not build myself nor did I verify myself because while it's high value, it is low risk due to the many rounds of secure math protecting it.

As to trusting Apple or any other corporation or government. You implicitly trust your hardware manufacturers, all of them, unless you build your own hardware from scratch. Same goes for software, even open source software.

The majority of creationists *are* Christian, but are *not* Catholic. If you are upset that Catholics' good names are sullied by creationism, you should point your anger at creationists, not those pointing out that creationists are religious nuts, because they *are* religious nuts.

You might look into using Markdown in your favorite editor. It's portable, being only text, but supports a good set of formatting. It's easy to convert to html, pdf, and other formats.

I don't. I actually delete my email rather than squirrel every last message away. If it's something worth filing, I file it, in a system that's meant to retain and search information. If it's not worth filing, I delete it. My mail box is currently: 19MB.

Most people know how to search their mail in Google. It takes a particular skill that you have and most people don't have to search their mail in Outlook. I think there's a search problem in Outlook here. It's a solved problem; we have exemplars of good solutions.

An alternative should be comparable. Ad-supported and subscription-based are pretty different types of services catering to different kinds of consumers. It was you who moved to goalposts by stating competitors that were quite different.

You seem to argue that an oppressed majority calling for liberation is justification of an invasion. you did not show that just because it was a majority that was oppressed it was a majority that wished invasion. That implies that only some of the oppressed need to desire invasion to justify invasion.

If in the United States, the Christians, a majority, some of whom claim are oppressed by liberal-minded media, had a few members who called for Putin to liberate the United States, would that be more or less just an invasion in your world view?

What gets me every time I talk to a Comcast representative is that when i ask them "how much will this cost me per month?" they cannot give me a dollar amount. They always say "$149 plus taxes and fees." They do not seem to know, or be able to derive, at the time of the sales call, that figure that they are perfectly happy to compute and print on the monthly bill.

My policy is that if you can't tell me how much you will charge me, I cannot figure out if I am going to pay you. I'm forced to pass.

Comcast is accountable?

My Comcast has a board of directors. They only listen to their friends. They only answer to their friends. And, no surprise, many of their friends have lots of money.

With a Comcast, you have to wait for the next election, assuming you even have a chance of throwing out the previous office holders.

Well, it's a tad late now. Years ago when they were raising my rates while degrading my quality they told me over the phone that I am lying and video quality is much better now that it is HD and perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about and watching SD.

Glad to hear they've finally admitted its an issue that needs to be addressed, though, and, possibly addressed it. My neighbor though still has really shit video quality on Comcast compared to OTA, even as late as last month when he commented how vastly different my PBS feed looked. He asked if I had some sort of 4k feed or something (right!). I went down to his apartment and saw what he was watching and yeah, still night-and-day difference. Perhaps they haven't rolled out switched digital video to my area yet.