Lots of folks need guns badly to defend themselves without going out and looking for trouble.

That's because you're generalizing improperly. Any gun that does not infallibly go bang whenever you pull the trigger is useless. That one gun is broken does not make all guns broken.

The problem is that the mere existence and sale of such a gun will force every gun sold in New Jersey to have it...so whether it's designed to become mandatory or not, it will be.

Electronics don't fail just because of loss of power, you know...

And if gun ban advocates truly want safety, they'd work to repeal that NJ law. As things stand, ti's nothing less than a back-door gun ban, and unconstitutional.

All what accidental deaths? The number is tiny - less than 100 a year. That number is also dropping monotonically every year, and has done so since the 1930s.

If you want to end kids' accidental deaths, get rid of bathtubs and swimming pools. They kill far more.

Accidental use of guns causes fewer deaths than just about any other accident you can name. The number is small, and has been dropping monotonically since the 1930s.

Unauthorized use of guns is not going to be significantly impacted by something like this. There are far too many out there without it, and those will never be retrofitted.

Perhaps it's a user interface limitation, instead of a storage limitation?

It must not be simply reliable. It must be infallible: it must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun with the technology is useless.

You never need a gun until you need it badly - and if it fails, you're worse off than if you did not have it to begin with.

I'm fluent in C. I understand C statics fine. What gets me is their interaction with classes and instances and...

I'm not complaining about templates mainly because I'm keeping my fingers the hell out of them!

It's not? Interviews aren't supposed to be full of nothing but softball questions.

Don't get me started on Boost. It's caused me more than a little headache all by itself...like, say, trying to build a specific version against a specific version of OS X.

As I said, I learned about it by hacking on it. That's my point: you can't discover that kind of thing by hacking. With that said, got any suggestions about where I pick up what you think are the basics?

I learned C++ the hard way: by hacking on a million-LOC program. It's taught me to loathe the language. It's big, complex, and incomprehensible. I once spent three days chasing a bug through a twisty little maze of templates, all different. I routinely struggle with the implications of static vs. not, member variables vs. globals vs. statics, functions that are part of a class vs. those that aren't... Getting code to even compile is often an exercise in trying something, running the build process, then trying something else, lather, rinse, repeat. It's left me frustrated enough to want to drive to College Station and scream at the walls.

All of this has left me wishing for the days of C, in which I'm quite fluent.

Nevertheless, the world seems (perhaps overly) enamored of C++, and I'm probably going to have to deal with it. How do I learn to at least tolerate it, if not like it, instead of actively hating it?

What the story doesn't mention is that, compared to Skype 2.8, the Skype 5/6 user interfere sucks. Users have been complaining ever since it was rolled out, and Skype's answer has always been to use 2.8.

Fortunately, there's a way to make the old version not check for updates: use your local DNS or hosts file to address ui.skype.com to 127.0.0.1. The update check fails, and Skype 2.8 runs, fat, dumb, and happy. I'm pretty sure this works for older versions of 5 or 6, as well.

This is just another spammer and net criminal enabler. The EFF has long fought against efforts to end spam. Encouraging wide-open net access with no accountability is just another step down that road.

The EFF: enabling spammers since the 1990s.