That's just plain ridiculous. Countries with the highest quality of life still have people reproducing, just not in huge numbers. So instead of 3-8 kids per couple average, we have 0-2 kids, and end up with a bit less than replacement rate. The only reason populations are expanding is because of immigration.

Eliminate immigration for the most part, and greatly extend lifespans, and you'll still see a stable population.

If everybody gets to live a very long time, then we run out of resources

That entirely depends on the birth and death rates. Eliminating aging won't keep you from dying when a bus hits you. And we've found over and over that when people live comfortable, middle-class lifestyles with a proper education, they generally don't want to have a ton of kids any more. Every western country (plus Japan) is experiencing ZPG right now except for immigration.

If we figure out how to curb over-population and only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations

You're assuming we won't figure out how to reproduce artificially. That's a really bad assumption. If we can figure out how to stop or reverse aging, you don't think we can figure out how to continue to reproduce with artificial means (or even how to rejuvenate the gonads)?

unless we figure out how to dodge the who reproduction via sperm and eggs thing

Lots of people are already doing that: IVF, frozen sperm and eggs, etc. If for some weird reason we can figure out how to reverse aging in every part of the body *except* the testes/ovaries, you don't think we'd just automatically freeze people's sperm and eggs when they're young?

One thing that could potentially change this entire equation would be extending the range in which humans can live, whether it be orbital habitats, terraformed planets or cozy lintel asteroids.

I don't see why those things couldn't be built. We're just too lazy to make them right now, since we'd rather fight wars with each other over religious idiocy and the like.

But even before any of that is doable, the population thing is a red-herring. Most likely, anti-aging treatments will be expensive, so will be confined to wealthier people, which mainly means westerners, and richer Asians. These people are *already* not having many kids. All the western nations would have to do is stop all immigration, which would immediately give them negative population growth (with current conditions), and then with much greater lifespans, they'll have zero population growth, or maybe slightly positive.

It's not like anti-aging treatments are going to make everyone suddenly want to emulate the Duggars.

You obviously aren't understanding the science behind anti-aging. The whole idea is that your body stays youthful; all the mechanisms in it which repair things work optimally, all the time, instead of falling apart with age like they do now (go find some small kid and a middle aged person, cut them both the same way, and then see how they heal differently). Though teeth might need to be replaced with implants, but most westerners these days have artificial parts in their teeth starting at rather young ages, either fillings or crowns. I challenge you to find me a 40-year-old without some dental work. Anyway, there's no need for artificial hips when you've figured out how to make the body repair itself properly. This might require periodic application of some kind of drug, or permanently-installed nanites, who knows? But no, most likely the future does not involve a bunch of old people with mostly-artificial bodies.

Nonetheless, I personally don't know any.

That's probably because you don't hang out with rednecks and other uneducated people much.

However, you're probably right about soccer.

So yeah C style C++ can be real crap.

It's better than C++ style C++, which wouldn't even work in a hard real-time system.

But I would prefer to see straight C used in these systems instead. I worked briefly on a project to compare an existing C++ system with one done with straight C and the SLOC was vastly smaller, and even the memory footprint was significantly lower. I don't think it's even that C++ itself can't be written tightly, it's that the C++ stuff has gotten really bloated by the way they define requirements and architect the systems; automatic code generation with DOORS doesn't help at all.

I can't imagine why they aren't already doing this, except maybe the technical challenge of storing video data in the "black box" where it'll survive a crash.

*shudder* Are avionics really written in C++?

Yes, but only a subset of it. Things like exceptions aren't allowed.

Is memory deterministically pre-allocated in such systems? That would certainly make it safer, but less flexible.

Yes, that's the whole idea. They aren't meant to be flexible, they're meant to do exactly what they're designed to do and no more, in a completely deterministic fashion. These systems aren't all things with UIs, they include all kinds of systems on an aircraft, which frequently don't have any UI at all except maybe some switches. On a car, an ABS computer would be a good example of one of these systems. There's no display or UI or anything of the sort; you just plug it into the car, and it sits there monitoring wheelspeed and brake pressure and when it sees a wheel locking up it releases brake fluid pressure to that wheel (it's a bit more complex than that, esp. on cars with dynamic stability control and traction control where these are all tied into the ABS, but this is the general idea). A system like that doesn't need to free memory, it just needs to allocate what it needs when it powers up, and then run its program continuously, monitoring inputs and controlling outputs (implementing transfer functions etc). All the tasks it'll ever have to do are well-defined, and all start up when the system powers up, and all get a timeslice.

And you never run out or memory since you've got an infinite amount of it?

If you did things right, you never run out of memory because you've planned every allocation and you have enough for them all.

Minimizing memory allocation/deallocation is a must, sicne these are functions with unknown and unbounded latency

Right, that's why they allocate all the memory up front and never deallocate it.

These embedded systems use C++, but according to an FAA standard that is very similar to the MISRA standard. Anything which is non-deterministic is forbidden. These even includes CPU caches, which are turned off on these systems.

Perhaps the presidency changed him, or perhaps his campaign was a lie to co-opt the enthusiasm of the masses. I don't think we'll ever really know.

What a rube. Anyone who has more than one digit in their IQ knows the answer is the latter.

Well, there is that theory about newly-elected Obama being sat down and shown a video of the JFK assassination, from a completely different angle.

I'm looking, right now, at a mountain of code, some 20+ classes, many with file-scope instantiations, every single fucking object a Qt object. The original developer noticed that the code for Qt-derived classes won't compile without a copy constructor so he very cleverly made empty copy constructors for all the classes so that even a shallow copy won't be performed. As expected, he also stores instances in containers - which means every now and then the program would give incorrect results with seemingly no predictable occurrences. It doesn't crash, mind, just gives incorrect answers.

Qt is an excellent library. I'm using it now on a personal project, and a lot of embedded systems use it. It sounds like the code you're looking at was written by someone completely incompetent. Qt does not need a copy constructor to compile a Qt-derived class. However, when you're doing a Qt project, usually most of your objects will be Qt objects. That's the whole idea: Qt is basically an extension to the language, and it's easier when you jump in and do everything the Qt way, including using Qt's containers and other base classes.

C++ is not C. C++ written like C tends to be crap code

You might want to avoid flying on commercial airliners then, because they have lots of avionics systems running C++ code exactly like that, with exceptions explicitly banned. Countless other embedded systems are the same way.

never, ever, worrying about cleaning up at the bottom of a function what you allocate at the top.

In these embedded systems, the "delete" keyword is also banned. You're never allowed to free memory once it's allocated.

I agree completely. Another useless bachelor's degree is Philosophy. It's a useless Master's degree too. I had a roommate in college who got a Master's in Philosophy. I'm not sure what he ended up doing, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with moving back home with his parents in their little town, and had nothing to do with philosophy.

As for a bit of socialization and practice and managing one's life, you can do all that at a local community for far less money than a 4-year university. The big thing you seem to get, socially, from a 4-year college is the whole dorm experience in your freshman and maybe sophomore years. I do think this is a good breaking-away-from-your-parents experience (it was for me), but does it need to cost that much money?

It does seem that our entire society needs a re-think on all this stuff.

nyone who says that Americans can't get over their not being number one in passenger rail has never talked to an American about the topic.

I completely disagree. There's tons of jingoist retards out there who think America is #1 in everything. You're probably not going to find many on Slashdot, because people here tend to have a decent level of education, but go talk to drooling Fox News watchers who dropped out of high school and you'll find them. These people are completely clueless how things are in the rest of the world. And they make up a very large voting bloc, so you can't disregard them as irrelevant.

Is it valuable as a life-enriching experience? Sure. Is it worth $100k (or whatever) to do that? No, I don't really think so, especially when someone else is paying.

On top of that, it's not like she knew going into it that her college experience was going to be mostly useless for her future career, and that she was going to end up working in a hotel. She was one of tons of kids who go into that degree program thinking they're going to have a great career in movies or theater, and then don't, just like tons of kids spend all their energy in athletics and then end up with nothing because they didn't make the cut to go into pro sports and end up working at McDonald's.

As for advantages for a particular social environment, I dunno. Are you talking about politicians getting history degrees at Yale and getting where they are because of their social connections there? Maybe that makes some sense for those people who go to such schools, but this girl isn't a politician, she works a low-pay job at a hotel. The state U she went to obviously doesn't give you the social connections that being a member of Skull & Bones does.

If people want to do theater work for fun, there's lots of community theaters looking for volunteers, where you can do that stuff without spending $100k and dedicating 4 years full-time to it. I had a neighbor who did exactly this: she was an actor in her community theater, and her husband helped build sets. I don't think society really has an obligation to pay that kind of money so people can have an enriching life experience, when you can do similar stuff absolutely for free. It's like this for just about anything: there's all kinds of cheap hobbyist stuff out there and volunteer work as well. You don't need to spend $100k to learn things any more. Programs like that, to me, are for people who are so serious about it (and talented enough) they want to do it as a profession.