Bjarne and the Community's creation was the bona fide beginning of my career. When I started, I thought I was a 7 in C++. Several years later, I was a 5. I wrote my best and worst code in the language, over 15 years, and I am still running into issues in the language that challenge me today. C++ helped me learn a lot about myself along the way, and I am grateful to Bjarne and the Community at large for that. A good article and interview, if not a tad brief.

Destroying the countries where attacks originate is a broken doctrine, IMO. Use of force should always be measured, and focused, lest history revile us. The ease of false flag operations in "cyberspace" make the nature of our responses to attacks even more important. I would dismiss Chertoff out of hand were it not for the possibility that, rather than harmless BS, talk like this may encourage a doctrine that will allow our government to start wars and engage in various intrigues, to evil ends. Chertoff co-birthed the anti-Christ fetus disingenuously called the "USA PATRIOT" act, so we should tell him to take his "overwhelming force" and sell crazy some place else. We seem to be stocked up already.

There are traders that I know who use stop loss orders reflexively. I never used them because they only purport to limit losses; they are really market orders triggered by price action, and they will chase bids down and leave you out of the game before you are even done with your coffee at the market open. I never imagined them chasing bids all the way down to zero until recently! Since the PTB don't seem intent on fixing anything, just affixing blame, I would strongly discourage stop-loss orders. They are not a substitute for being both present and disciplined while you are trading anyway!

I would have liked this post better if we lived in an alternate universe where you can't run Windows on a Mac. Respectfully, reality makes the parent post a complete waste of time. A Mac is a place where you can learn about Mac, Windows and Linux tech all in the same place either by dual booting or virtualizing; take your pick. Parent poster will not get this on his/her Dell, at least not by legal, reliable, nor easy means. Prices for Macs have gotten better but, unfortunately, are still quite high, and Apple seems to think we don't need to modify/maintain our hardware. These are, IMO, the only reasons one would need to buy a Dell at all.

Maybe this argument about which laptop this school should be *forcing* kids to buy is moot. Is it not so that online/portal/cloud type services have evolved to a point where they may obviate the need for a specific platform anyway? IMO, any school that is only pushing platform specific software down for kids to learn on has invested wrongly in our future. In 20 years, it could be that only a few big greedy companies will be left desperately clinging to this idea. The rest of us will have moved to the online platform for most of our daily needs.