Fanboys, basically. People who see competition between languages as some sort of sport, want to root for their team, and who in other times and places might be setting cars on fire to vent their rage at not "winning". I have my favorite languages, but I can make long lists of the deficits of each, and I believe they should appear on the Wikipedia pages in question.

The mechanism may be different, but the result is just as pernicious. An encyclopedia article is a wholly appropriate place to list and briefly discuss the benefits of a computer language. And most of the drawbacks of C++ are not really controversial, except in the minds of fanboys. This is not mere pedantry. It really is useful for newbies to be able to go to a Wikipedia article and get a basic sense of the pluses and minuses of a language, versus other languages.

Not sure that this is really new. The page for C++, for example, is regularly scrubbed of any critical material. At the moment, there is just one negative sentence, indicating that "C++ is sometimes compared unfavorably to [some other languages]". Whether that is an unbiased and appropriately detailed statement of the totality of current objective C++ criticism is left as an exercise for the reader.

Without commenting on whether or not HFT is socially useful, I'll just point out that many (if not most) economic activities in the modern world have little obvious social value. I can assure you, however, that the direct customers/counterparts of HFTs very much want the service that HFTs provide. If they go dark for even a day, their customers get very, very unhappy. It's kind of like Facebook: Do we need it? Not really. Shall we shut them down? You first...

This might sound like a wisecrack, but it is in fact the answer. You can be a Michaelangelo of programming, but if your boss comes in and tells you that from now on everyone will be using six-letter variables names, programming in Visual Basic, and using nothing but Perforce for version control, the quality and power of your results will be so-limited. Some people imagine that a really good programmer can overcome any set of such constraints, but it's easy to see that that's not the case.

That was a truly awesome concern troll, but it worries me that people might not appreciate it if they discover that old BenEnglish still programs in COBOL and stores his excrement in baby food jars in his cellar...

Because horses can't be programmed to subdue (and maybe mulch) protesters.

...and that the Internet exists, and that gay people are not the pariahs they once were, and that I'm not quite rich enough to buy you all off. I will work harder in the future to address these faults. A boycott can only delay the day when I will succeed in doing so. Thank you for paying attention, but please stop.

Sorry to hear it, but luckily we still have GCC...

Unfortunately, it's far from clear that the defendant would prevail, and he would be seriously harmed even if he did. I personally know of a kid that now has a juvenile record for something even more innocuous than this incident, but that was also twisted into something terror-y by some seriously vicious adults. It's kind of like the whole Satanic Ritual Abuse thing (remember that?). It'll keep going until we finally decide as a society to call bullshit.

This is pretty awesome, but do I really need it? Yeah, the generic charging pad is a great idea, but I'm not that crazy about "spooky energy at a distance"...

In the bureaucratic world, I've only seen two kinds of security: nonsensical and nonexistent. On the whole, I prefer the latter.

Am I the only one that read that as "TI-99/4A"? Personally, I found this device quite educational... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A

I've certainly seen cases where an organization could realize a substantial likely profit by paying someone millions of dollars to go away (or to just sit quietly in a room and stop working mischief). But any organization smart enough to realize this would not find itself in such a lopsided position to begin with. So mostly this state is just an observable marker of a poorly functioning organization.

This sounds like a rehash of the old "Computer Said It, So It Must Be True" meme from the not-so-distant past. If that experience can provide any guidance, people will mostly learn to ignore these flashy new graphics after 50 or 100 years or so...