The Divine Right of Kings is a modern phenomenon, mostly the 1700s IIRC, which is post-feudal (except in Russia, which was progressing into feudalism at the time). It continued into the 1900s in many places, in somewhat modified form.

If the King has all power, then a constitution, if granted, is limits on the royal power and prerogatives, and the government may do anything not forbidden to it. If the government is formed with a constitution as a charter, the government may only do what is allowed.

It didn't help that they disbanded the army period. AIUI, the original plan was to keep it around and use it for stability (provide employment for millions of young men, have native troops to keep law and order, etc.), and it was disbanded for no clear reason by the authorities there.

The army itself was mostly apolitical. The Republican Guard was not, and that should indeed have been disbanded (and disarmed).

The Constitution sets out a list of things the Federal government can do, and the Bill of Rights lists some things it is specifically not allowed to do. Within that scope, the government should work for the people of the US. (There are some implementation glitches here.) The US Supreme Court has no problem with throwing out laws that either violate the "government shall not" parts or aren't supported by the "Federal government may" parts.

The current domination of the Federal government is an outgrowth of its tax and spend powers. The US has enough tax powers to take in a whole lot of money, and the Federal government has pretty much unlimited ability to spend money. This means that states can get dependent on Federal grant money which they'll lose if they step too far out of line. That's how the 55mph speed limit came into effect way back when.

So what you're saying is that programmers need more than an iPad? I wouldn't want to program on a netbook either, so I'd be just as happy with the iPad. (Actually, I find that my phone, my laptop, and my desktop together to pretty much everything I want to do.)

And Muhammed being a prophet is officially recognized by a very large church. I've seen plenty of non-Catholics referring to this Francis guy as a "Pope", which is a religious designation.

The problem with tips is that they have become embedded in server compensation. From the original idea of a thank-you for above average service, it's become expected, to the point that minimum wage laws don't necessarily include servers at the same rate, the IRS will assume that servers make a certain amount of tip income and expects to see it reported, and base pay rates are set assuming a certain level of tips.

The result is that, when you don't tip in the US, you are not failing to reward the server, but in fact hurting him or her.

It used to be that, in any discussion of Microsoft software, there would be at least one person saying it was the best thing since sliced peanut butter, while at least one person claimed that it was almost unusable. It looks like this has changed to Apple hardware: you'll find at least one person whose Macs never lasted two years and one who only got rid of them because Apple stopped supporting the CPU ten years ago.

In the meantime, I'm going with the relatively unbiased surveys that consistently put Apple at or near the top for reliability and customer satisfaction.

Actually, they write and publish something that resembles an apology in some ways (at least in the US). A real apology acknowledges wrong action (deliberate or accidental) and regret for the action. The usual corporate version of an apology says the corp had good reason to do what it did, and is sorry that anybody had a problem with it.

You're making assumptions here. How do we know that humans aren't on the peaceful side of intelligent life-forms?

If we take a look at the developed world, we find that sports and martial arts rarely kill, and ones that cause too much injury get into trouble (consider what's happening to football in the US). Sports involving animals fighting are pretty much banned. Slavery is illegal, and we really haven't managed to eliminate any sort of crime, only reduce it a lot. I don't know what you mean by "very corrupt" here, but around here you can do pretty much anything without bribes. We have laws designed to keep people safe in the workplace, and devote a lot of technology to keeping people safe overall. We have approximately zero population growth. War is normally waged against less developed and more violent societies, being rare against other developed societies.

If you think the way you describe humanity is anywhere near normal for advanced civilizations, then we're on the dove side.

auto_ptr actually does what it's supposed to do, in terms of memory management. It doesn't play well with other parts of the language. It's deprecated because unique_ptr is at least as good in all ways, and better in some.

You don't really need to understand smart pointer lifecycles in detail; you have to know how to use them and stick to it. Raw pointers never own, so you never create an object using a raw pointer and you never delete a raw pointer. Raw pointers may be passed from function to function, but should never be stored anywhere with a longer lifetime than the function that stores it. To show individual ownership, you use unique_ptr. For shared ownership, use shared_ptr. (If you feel the need to store a raw pointer in some more persistent way, go back and change it to a shared_ptr.)

Finally, use the container template classes when you can, since they handle memory management well.

Do that, and your biggest problem with memory will be leaks when you have circular references.

Managed languages eliminate C/C++'s largest (and most critical) attack surface.

In the cases you cite, you can get the same safety in C++, and you really should.

First, you use some discipline with pointers. Owning pointers are either unique_ptr or shared_ptr, which eliminates most memory leaks (not those in a circular structure, though), and makes sure that memory is neither double-freed nor used after it is freed.

Second, you never use C-style arrays. Use string and vector instead, and you've eliminated buffer overflows. Use .at() instead of [] (or make your own vector type that makes [] range-checked, as Stroustrup suggests), and you've eliminated wayward memory accesses.

This does require some discipline, but it's mechanical discipline. It doesn't require creativity, and it's easily checked in a code review because it's clear, mechanical, and messing up that discipline requires screwing up on an individual line of code in an obvious way.

First, there have been different court rulings and laws affecting EULAs, so while your "usually unenforceable" may be true, you can't rely on it.

Second, it's real easy to get into trouble in an unclear legal situation, and winning the suit against you may be almost as bad as losing. (The only winning move is not to play.) Many people aren't going to risk that.

Destruction of goods can lead to prosperity. In 1939, the US was in a depression. War spending kicked in, and pushed the economy hard. War spending is effectively destruction of goods, lots of them literally and other goods being spent making things that have no civilian use. The US produced tens of thousands of Sherman tanks. Many were literally destroyed, and the remainder were largely surplus that nobody wanted come September 1945.

This caused the US economy to boom. It also built a lot of demand, since most people were working (millions unproductively from an economic point of view), they were getting paid, and there wasn't that much to buy. Despite widespread fear, the economy remained dynamic after the war ended.

It takes special circumstances, but it can work. Economies are complicated, and sane and honest people know that.

As a resident of Minneapolis, I've been in occasional two-foot snowfalls. It is not a cake walk. It takes a day or two to get dug out and life back to normal.

Wrong. Ball pressure is measured relative to the outside atmosphere, which is about 14.5psi. To use the gas law, we need to consider the difference between 25 psi (the balls as measured) and 27 psi (regulation pressure). Using your figure of 11C, or about 284K, we see that we have about 0.088 psi per kelvin, or an inflation temperature of about 307K, which puts the temperature in the 90s F if they were earlier filled to the minimum allowed pressure. Possible, but unlikely.