Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).

But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.

Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.

I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.

While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.

It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.

May ... may.

However the shirt may be just fine. And the shirt you pay $25 for ..may.. be a piece of crap (lookin at you land's end).

The software may be good- or it may be a piece of ill designed crap written by a 1st world citizen who is a better huckster than programmer.

But the money is in your hand.

Yes. I worked with an office which had 400 indian programmers and 400 american programmers. They laid off 350 of the american programmers and did just fine.

I worked directly with the indian coders. They had some very solid coders who were better coders than the standard american programmer. And at a business that isn't focused on IT, it's pretty hard for them to retain really good programmers. Heck- it's hard to hire them in the first place.

Back in 2002, the indians were very good- I think it was mostly their masters degree candidates. By 2005, they sucked pretty bad. But by 2010, they were decent again. The only issue was the turnover and the failure to say "no" to management (instead saying "I'll do my best"). The other issues you mention were on the wane since 2008.

I've used AVG and Avast plus malwarebytes and the microsoft cleaner.

They are free.

It's been 20 years since I got a virus but I've had several caught attempts.

I left AVG a couple years ago and went to Avast. It's a little pushing on upselling lately.

I've had to clean virii off of friends computers. Malwarebytes is good for that.
Avast is also good for that.

Avast has a "web page reputation" feature.. but to be honest, the only thing it ever flagged for me is the site that records all DMCA filings (which I knew was safe which mean the corporations had corrupted Avast's rating system for that page).

I'm not sure how the hell my friends get them. I has to be lol cats or something like that. I got to a few porn sites now and then and never had a problem.

Malwarebytes has been effective for cleaning a machine that was infected already.

I don't keep the microsoft cleaner on disk but download it as needed so I always have to look it up.

Competition is great. For the customer. For awhile. Not so good for the businesses that are competing. Perhaps you've heard of the term "dumping"? That's when a "competitor" can afford to sell below cost just to drive his competition out of business. Great for the customer, until the competition goes away and prices go back up.

We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and ... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?

Before you lecture me on how I should have shopped at the local dealer to support them, I did, and it wasn't enough to keep them alive.

Cable companies aren't like Borders. People don't buy services from more than one cable company at a time and if they aren't cable customers by now they likely won't become one just because competition moves in. At best, a new cable company can split the existing customer base. That's not enough to cover the fixed costs for plant, and certainly not enough to provide return on investment for over-building the existing system. The incumbent has a significant advantage because he's likely paid off a lot of the investment in the plant and equipment and can cut his prices to keep the new guy from making any money at all. Yes, that's good for the customer, except the customers of the new guy, and only as long as it takes for the new guy to give up and go away.

I bet Adam Smith would have understood that. I bet he'd understand when a company does a business plan and sees that there is no money to be made from competing in a limited, existing marketplace with high startup costs. I bet he'd understand why it takes a company the size of Google to do that kind of thing, and even then they're not rushing into the market.

So, the fact remains, it isn't the few percent skimmed from the cable companies in franchise fees that prevents competition. It's the ability to predict a negative return on investment for any new competitor, especially for the first few years, that keeps them from wasting their time and money.

If you disagree, you are free to dump a few million into competing with Comcast in our fair city and prove me wrong. I doubt I'd switch service to a start-up with no track record, but show me your list of services and we'll see.

It's not the few percent franchise fee that limits competition, it's the knowledge that a second franchisee for the same function would be splitting the available market and nobody would make a profit without raising prices -- and reducing the overall market.

While there may be a few people in an area who would actually start buying services from the new competitor because they aren't the existing company, they aren't enough to cover the fixed costs of running a second cable company in that area. If one cable company has 50% saturation (half the available consumers), then a second company can plan on splitting that number with the existing company and you can't profit if you have only 25% saturation. Not without raising rates. The fixed costs for plant as services are just too high.

There may have been a perception of power which may be enough

How? That does not seem reasonable.

Either way, it's incredibly stupid for someone in his position to get involved at all with a current student.

What he did is INCREDIBLY stupid. I'm not saying he does not bear primary fault in this. He had the most to lose also, it was just idiotic. Although if you were playing devils advocate, couldn't you claim he had a sexual addiction that compelled him to ask? That sounds as reasonable as saying the women had some kind of illness that compelled them to submit; in fact his actions speak even more strongly to there being a mental issue that overrode strong rational and moral reasons not to act as he did. The potential impact to him was proportionality much greater than any one of the women, exactly because of his position and status - and yet he appears to have contacted hundreds of women. How can you look at that and not claim he was mentally ill?

What the women did was stupid also though. They had no reason to send him nude images or video. At any time they could have simply ceased communication, and gotten what they wanted (physics education) from some other source.

That's addressed in the article.

The fact you say "The article" makes me wonder if you read either. There are two...

The thing is, I read both articles. Neither of them address the position of power issue. One says "she felt trapped". But how? That makes NO SENSE when you can so easily block or otherwise ignore people communicating solely over social media, which offer many means for blocking annoying people. There is no means of trapping someone.

I would understand how someone might "feel trapped" if they were a student attending a college into which they had put forward substantial tuition. I would understand if they were to gain credit from a course needed to move forward in education. Even just being in physical proximity I could see it. There are a lot of circumstances in which I can image someone feeling trapped in some way, where there was a small amount of power to leverage - but not in this case. The course was free, the grades if any counted for nothing. The moment the contact started getting lewd the person should have broke off contact, and could easily have done so.

I'll leave the RRTFA to the person willing to make an argument/ask a question that takes the entire article into account, as you have utterly failed to do.

So you're saying that a photon coming off the foot of David Beckham, or a spit-photon thrown by Nolan Ryan, travels slower than a photon normally would?

Shhh ... this is how the SSC scientists make their beer money -- tricking the locals into betting like that.

i think the argument is that she couldn't refuse since the professor was in a position of power.

I didn't think the grades from these courses counted for anything (if they even were grades) so where exactly did the power come from? She was under no obligation to keep up with the course and if someone started asking me fore nudes I'd just learn physics some other way.

I would presume scooters and motorcycles have way easier standards to meet since they don't have to do anything to protect the rider - I wonder if it would make more sense to start by producing those. Custom scooter/motorcycle designs could be pretty cool.

The point of having the journal would not be for evidence the resulting book was real, it would be simply to have vast amount of source material to create a book from more quickly, so you could have a book ready sooner after trial.

He could presumably re-create most of the information from memory, but memory is fickle and it would take a lot more time to get it out.

Not very much noise, and if the car is already slowing to stop at an intersection or to make a turn, that tire noise is very low. Below the other noises on the street. I've been on the streets, both as a pedestrian and a bicyclist, and had an electric car sneak up on me from behind before, and I know it isn't the safest way to run things.

There is no reason to make a vehicle that can kill someone who mistakenly steps in front of it as quiet as possible. You might notice that trucks (even those with diesel engines that make considerable noise) are usually equipped with backup alarms to create noise to alert people in the area that he's backing up.

The demand for silence on the streets is ridiculous, and the claim that the next guy makes about billions of people living on the streets needing absolute silence even more so.