Thanks. I hadn't come across that site before, and it looks useful.

Does anyone know of a site or mailing list specifically dedicated to checking out the new updates and rating how safe and reliable they are to install? I've had far too many stability and performance problems after installing recommend updates to trust Microsoft's "Install this update to make {some important but unspecified change} to Windows" messages any more. However, life's too short to keep running a search on every update ID every month to see which ones are getting red flagged.

This is how good science is supposed to work, peer review to find faults and ongoing refinement until certainty is attained.

If this was not a challenge it would not be Science.

I decided four quotations was enough to make my point, but that observation by Mencken was nearly the fifth. It comes to mind every time some government minister talks about repealing the Human Rights Act and cites the difficulties they've had in deporting a tiny number of high profile people as their justification.

To borrow a well-known retort, if you outlaw encryption then only outlaws will use encryption. How does opening everyone else up to fraud, identity theft, and all the other problems encryption helps to fight on-line do anything to prevent bad people from communicating securely when encryption tools are widely available?

That is all true, but it's difficult to have that sensible debate when one side's argument is expressed with approximately the intellectual and ethical rigour of "there are scary people out there who you should be scared of, and if you don't let us do anything we want no matter the other consequences then those scary people will kill other people and it will be your fault".

I honestly don't know what point you're trying to make here. Do you understand that the Human Rights Act is national law, and that the rights and freedoms within its scope can therefore be protected by our own courts without necessarily resorting to any action at European level?

Are we talking at cross-purposes here? My point was that plenty of people who do presumably have access to the whole picture, including sensitive details about security procedures and threat assessments and whatever else goes on behind closed doors, still lean toward liberty over security on this issue.

For example, right now the Lib Dems are in government. Their leader is the Deputy PM. They have MPs on relevant select committees in Parliament. As such, it is reasonable to assume that at least some senior Lib Dems have access to sensitive information about any identified threats that are out there. And yet they still all seem to oppose the so-called snooper's charter, citing similar civil liberties concerns to the rest of us.

Of course. But when people who have literally led governments or armed forces can still maintain that position, any appeal to blind trust by an authoritarian government must surely demand a healthy degree of scepticism.

That is a reasonable ethical argument in favour of having laws, but unfortunately it is sometimes quite far from how the world really works. Laws are made by a small group of people, subject to a wide range of influences, most of which are not promoting the best interests of the population. Ideally, the democratic machinery of a government ensures that the population's interests still outweigh the other factors, but I think we all know this doesn't always happen.

The primary benefit of a formal constitution is to establish that certain principles are so important that they must be beyond the reach of whatever small group of lawmakers happens to hold power at any given time. To some extent, our Human Rights Act here has served a similar purpose in recent years, but of course the Tories want to get rid of that as well. In the absence of effective safeguards like this, as we have seen all too often in recent years, the politics of fear can dominate the agenda.

It's almost like playing quotation bingo with these issues now.

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- Pitt the Younger

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

Well, that's exactly the assumption I'm questioning. Certainly it was true once, but I'm not sure the gap is anywhere near that wide any more. It's not just about the differences written into the language specs, like overloading and construction/destruction in C++. It's also about all the things that aren't specified at all but matter in practice.

Perhaps the balance will shift back a bit now that both C and C++ have incorporated more detailed semantics in some of the tricky areas into their recent specifications, particularly in terms of the memory access model and concurrency, but even that is just the headline example at the top of a long list.

It seems you missed my point. Both C and C++ have huge amounts of non-obvious things going on under the surface with modern compilers and processors/hardware architecture. The parts of C++ that add further implicit behaviours really aren't that big a deal in comparison, and ruling out C++ for systems programming on the grounds of magic happening and expecting C to be much better in that respect is highly optimistic.

For better or worse, that hasn't really been true for a long time now. Modern processors and the related architecture have become so complicated that generating correct, efficient code is an extremely specialist skill. Once you move beyond toy examples with basic flow control and arithmetic, it's common today that what you get out of a C compiler won't seem to bear much resemblance to what you put in, unless you happen to be one of the handful of people in the world who really is an expert in compiler technology and code generation on your particular platform.