This is not about the blocking the availability of contraception, it's about not having it as a mandatory part of a healthcare plan.

What I don't get here why should any contraceptive, especially one that provides no protection against STDs be on any healthcare plan at all?

I know the pill has other uses and I don't object those being covered by healthcare, but contraception is a low, predictable and avoidable cost compared to things like heart surgery and chemotherapy, which is where insurance is really needed. It's not like a woman suddenly finds herself being in a long-term monogamous relationship where she must use oral contraception and is suddenly is bankrupted by the cost of the pill. At the very least her husband/boyfriend can keep using condoms, or she could buy a diaphragm, or the couple could practice non-penatrative, oral or anal sex until they've saved up enough money for a month's worth of pills, or any of the myriad other solutions to this problem. Contrast this to traditional healthcare costs where the patient gets an unforseen issue and will regress, become disabled or die unless they are treated at great cost. Healthcare should cover those the things that a normal person could not afford or predict, stuff like contraceptives, and even worse running shoes, sports products and other "free stuff to keep you healthy" that so many plans provide can be anticipated for and are not that expensive for the type of people who can buy healthcare anyway and should be user pays.

Getting back to other contraceptives, condoms are inconvenient, uncomfortable and un-romantic and sexual deprivation is even worse, so I don't see why non-sexually active people and people who use condoms should not have to subsidise this cost for those lucky enough to have regular un-protected sex. Furthermore, if a woman's on the pill, she's less likely to demand a man wears a condom, since she does not have to worry about pregnancy. Now, the most common STDs like gonorrhoea, chlamydia and even syphilis may actually be cheaper to cure than prevent (1 course of antibiotics vs a decade's supply of condoms), but some of the more exotic STDs like Hep-C and HIV are extremely expensive to treat and could cost the insurance provider millions, paid for by other customer's premiums. Now, people are generally stupid enough to risk a 1 in 10,000 chance of catching those two nasty things for a night of passion. But give them a ~30% chance of conceiving a child and they might think enough to go and buy some rubber, which reduces Hep-C/HIV, keeps more folks healthy and makes insurance cheaper for all.

Don't get me wrong, I love the pill. I just still think 1) oral contraception is against the interest of the healthcare system 2) sex with neither condom nor pregnancy is a privilege worth paying for.

ITER is an initiative 45% funded by the EU and 9% funded by the US, that Americans repeatedly complain about sucking away all of America's money, even though it was America's idea to build it in the first place, America gets an equal share of the knowledge gained and America only has to pay one 11th of the cost, despite having the largest economy out of the participants.

Why is it that whenever I see one of you countryman's names (excluding Swedish ones), my immediate thought is "why would a F1 racing driver be speaking at a security conference anyway?"

OK, assume for a minute he is right.

Then from this, take a further leap into wild and fanciful speculation and assume that:

"Had this not been in place in 2012 and 2013, then another 9/11 would have befallen us".

What can we now infer?

If these systems were not in place in 2012 and 2013, 3,000 people would be dead and 317 million people would be free from government surveillance.

Compare this to US involvement in WWII where 418 thousand Americans died and managed to free France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, South Korea and some of South East Asia (just over 200 million people all up), with the rest being taken by equally-oppressive Communism and it sounds like incredibly good value for human life.

A square mile, and a square mile with a permanent population of 7000 people at that, a small, third rate town.

The courts and laws are still the Queen's, so they can't simply seize you and lock you up if they feel like it. Is this a toothless dictatorship or what?

If you cannot stand their silly "city", don't move there or invest there.

So, Microsoft finally does something no geek could object to and the FSF's response is "even if this looks like a good thing, this can't be a good thing because it's proprietary". It just makes me wonder why they bother making a statement; it's proprietary, it always is and it always has been.

Oh yeah, the Liaoning right?

China buys a crappy 22 year old Soviet bucket, pretending it's a floating casino, puts a new coat of paint on it and calls it a warship.

Suddenly everyone's hangmu this and hangmu that, it's picture (any generic aircraft carrier picture they can find) is stuck on ads for anything a patriotic man might like to buy.

The whole thing is quite bemusing.

Fine, unique_ptr then. Regardless, auto_ptr was only ever 10 lines of code, if it was to be removed completely, it could still be re-added in 2 minutes. Point is, in C++ you can write pointers that free themselves. Destructors are super useful for everything, I use them to free all kinds of memory, as well as to release mutexes and stop timers when the it returns, breaks or gotos out of a block.

C++ is indispensable for 3d engine programming for the following reasons.

• You tend to use a lot of refcounting here and there to manage freeing of resources. C++ through constructors, destructors and operator overloading means it is hard to screw this up unless you try. Even when you don't need refcounting, you can use auto_ptr or something to make sure something's freed when it needs to be. I used to have memory leaks or heap corruptions regularly when using C, with C++ I run into that stuff maybe yearly.
• A lot of the most time-sensitive inner loops tend to need to work on multiple different types of buffers, like manipulating different vertex formats, different bitdepths/formats of textures, different lengths of index buffers, etc. Template functions let you write this in a way that will execute just as fast as if it was using define macros, but far easier to read and maintain, meaning one no longer has to choose between maintainability and efficiency, the easy way is also the right way.
• Mostly, the OO model fits really well. An "object" represents something that more or less actually behaves like an actual real world object with various behaviours peculiar to that type of object, that need to fit together in a heterogeneous collection of other objects in the scene graph. You can do this in C, but maintaining vtables and such gets tiresome and problematic. C++ makes this all rather easy.
• STL once again makes the easy way the right way. Using quicksort to sort a list, using red-black trees to store a dictionary, using a dynamically resizing vector to store an unknown length array is actually easier to implement things in the asymtotically efficient way and safe way than to do things in an inefficient or dangerous way. Stack/heap over/under runs are rare, since buffers can be allocated dynamically without the programmer even thinking about it. Templated functions and classes in the STL allow you to use your fastest data structures and algorithms wherever you like for less effort than it takes to write a bubble sort. You can re-arrange an array of any object you like into a heap in a single line without a single function call or malloc.

Why would it be lost uniformly? Evolution relies on the fact that better chromosomes would be lost from the genepool at a slower rate because they would lead to greater fitness and worse chromosomes would be lost at a faster rate because they would lead to a lesser fitness. Y-chromosomes would be even more sensitive to this effect since men only have one and so (in my admittedly limited knowledge) it is impossible to be merely a carrier of any of the genes on it, meaning the effects of less capable chromosomes would quickly become manifest.

At some point in their careers, all programmers, after spending a month hunting down a heap corruption, or a race condition, or some other bug nasty like that, come to the realisation that they are spending more time fixing mistakes than writing code. At this moment, most, but not all programmers follow a very logical path of reasoning. They think to themselves, "well, if this code took me 1 week to write, then 4 to fix, that is five weeks, what if I spent 3 weeks writing it carefully, then it would be done right away and I wouldn't have to fix it, I could have been done two weeks earlier!".

From that moment on, this programmer becomes all but useless to their current and future employers.

"Why?" Seasoned veterans may ask. "It saves time in the long run! You are just focussing on the short term results, being distracted by smoke and mirrors and building upon pillars of sand!"

Well, that is occasionally the case, but not usually. What is more often the case is when something is implemented it is either not what we needed or not implemented how it should have been implemented. When something is more or less built, nomatter how badly it is built, it is so clear and obvious what we needed instead and how it should have been made. If you had done that useless feature badly in 1 week, it could have been thrown out and we could have moved on. Sure, your experience might have told you that this was a waste of time, great, could you have told everyone what we really need? Are you going to take the reigns and pull the project in the right direction, or are you just going to be content in doing nothing in preference to doing some useless task?

The thing is, sure, you might do the right thing, in the right way the first time and the twenty year old across the room probably will do the wrong thing, in the wrong way the first and maybe even the second time. However, are you so positive that you will be finished before that twenty year old has finished his third and correct solution? Are you sure that what you build will be better than what the twenty year old builds after two attempts? Is your stable and clean version so much more useful to your team than the twenty year old's buggy first attempt that they will be happy to go without even seeing it for another few weeks, when they could have continued using it as a prototype or placeholder for a less buggy version.

Anyway, a few general maxims to stay relevant as you get older: 1) bad code is not so hard to rewrite 2) useless code is even easier to delete 3) if you're stumped on a problem, just try something, if it's wrong, you'll find out very soon. 4) no amount of experience, no amount of guile, no amount of planning or foresight can compare to a little intuition, a flurry of activity and being willing to make mistakes.

• * You can't get STDs from porn.
• * Pornographic videos and literature are not human, so its distribution cannot be human trafficking.
• * If your wife catches you watching a bunch of porn, she is unlikely to divorce you.
• * Porn rarely gets beaten up by pimps and johns.
• * Almost everyone openly or secretly loves porn, criminalising it would be too hard.

Well, this is true, but wasn't the aeroplane, telephone, radio, computer, microwave, steam engine, train, electric motor, light bulb, antibiotics, refrigerator, liquid fueled rocket etc. invented by white middle/upper class males born in the US and UK? Didn't various other types white middle/upper class males also invent the helicopter, auto mobile, internal combustion engine, jet engine and nuclear power? Weren't gunpowder, the printing press, solid fueled rockets, the compass and paper invented Chinese middle/upper class males, who also score highly on these tests?

Nope, all a sexist, racist and classist conspiracy.

I'd be even more surprised to find out that Australia had a president. Unless the Indonesians mistook the President of the Australian Senate for an important political leader.

In my experience, the people drawn to startups over large companies, whether they be in engineering, sales, marketing, whatever tend to be those who favour directness and observable results over formality and working in an emotionally calm environment. I think he's right in that you _can_ in fact mostly tell things how they are in such an environment and in fact be appreciated for it.

However, what you cannot do is be unfairly abusive, unfairly critical or unfairly dismissive, since in the same measure that a fair comment is always justified nomatter how blunt, an unfair one is almost impossible to defend nomatter how benignly phrased. Furthermore, in such a small environment, it will always come back at you. Do not criticise what is in fact good or dismiss what is in fact correct, since this is no more accurate or truthful than a yes-man praising rubbish. Do not fail to praise those things done well as emphatically as you denounce what is bad. Try to be fair in word and deed and useful people will never dislike you too deeply.

Beyond fairness, directness must in fact be direct. Going out of your way to assign blame is going out of you way. A spiteful aside is an aside. If what you're saying is not a pleasantry then it must be relevant to the task at hand, one cannot expect others to willingly sit and listen to criticism if it serves no purpose besides your own gratification and emotional release. However if something is both relevant and true but a team member's pride rejects it, then that is their problem, startups have neither the time nor the money for such things.