A practical joke? Are you joking? C++ is not designed so that every feature must be learned and used. It's complexity derives from the fact that it supports OOP, functional programming, generic programming and I'm sure others that Bjarne would happily describe to you and the reasoning behind supporting features being included in the language. Those that are confused by C++'s complexity are doing it wrong. As with Perl it's OK to use only what you're comfortable with, no one is going to make fun of you for not using advanced features and if you like you can keep a C++ program pretty basic.

But it supports all these features to give people what they need to get their jobs done. Lambdas looked a little strange to me at first too but as I studied the examples in Bjarne's book they became clear and I think they are quite expressive, easy to use and worth looking into, especially when you combine them with the types and algorithms in the STL.

Look, I'm a Bjarne fanboy, have been since I started programming in the 90's so maybe my bias is showing through but I never thought I'd come to an article about C++ on /. and find the only comments above a 3 were people whining about how complex a programming language is. Programming is complex, system's programming doubly so and C++ is designed to help reduce that complexity, while at the same time remaining resource efficient, when it's used correctly. If it's too hot to handle for you there is always Visual Basic.

* citation needed

WikiNews is news so maybe I should have mentioned it as well. I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment expressed in the article, just pointing out a related article.

My take on Wikipedia with regard to news is that it probably can't be trusted at face value as most "news" these days is so controversial and people on the fringes of opinion have a huge bias and interest in spinning this news.

Wikipedia works for me as a starting point for serious studying of a subject (e.g. the list of references in the better articles), a quick answer about pop culture and figuring out in what order I should watch some of the cartoons I've recorded on my DVR.

News? Not so much; but given the tabloids and crap journalism has gone through recently in Britain I can't say I'm surprised by the results of the poll in the article.

A yahoo news article claims the general public in England trusts Wikipedia more than traditional news outlets.

And "defamed" or called out on something questionable? Genuinely asking, I never heard of this British journalist until today...

Yeah, I noticed that after I posted. You'd think I'd learn to RTFA before posting!

Security Week can do better than that! :-)

So is it "Hackers" demanding better security or is it "a group of security researchers"? Because the inflammatory headline surely conjures the modern, media definition of Hacker and not "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary". And the headline certainly doesn't make me think of security experts at all!

Come on /. , you can do better than that...

Yeah, that's some scary stuff and given your findings I guess it blows my analogy out of the water. I still say whether it's snail or email the fact is we need routing data to be readable but that doesn't mean it should be collected and collated for any other purpose.

It's not the postman reading it though is it? There is a difference between an employee of the post office reading an address to route mail properly vs. gathering all address, storing them and creating programs to discover all connections and relationships between addressees.

It's not that they read the meta data that's the problem, it's what they do with it.

If they can lead the way on this it shouldn't be long before others follow - gmail, live, etc. Does Yahoo still have a large enough user base to really make others take notice and react if they pull this off?

I've only glanced at this in passing so I'm not 100% sure how accurate/legit it is but an interesting read non-the-less... Social Media demographics

Main takeaway:

Was that door ever closed? They're ranking algorithm has been arbitrary since the beginning and has changed very frequently over the years in an effort to reduce gaming the system and to generally improve results. If anything I'd say it's nice that they're at least telling people about this change vs. just quietly adjusting things and leaving site owners to wonder what happened to their page rank.

Excellent article, thanks!

Learn some assembly. Not because you will use it every day (or ever) but because it helps remind you that all the code we typically write is just layers of abstraction on top of a machine (which even assembly is, albeit very low level abstractions).

An old boss from years ago (a mentor for me really) watched me troubleshooting a network issue in an application. He said to me "you seem to be having trouble spotting the problem. Have you tried going lower down the stack?". So I tried ping by name, nothing, ping by number, nothing, etc. Finally after reviewing ip configurations, arp and routing tables and probably a few other things I forget I figured out I had a bad cable.

That taught me a lesson that I've applied to many areas of computers, including programming, over the years. If something seems like it should work but does not maybe something underneath it is the problem. If you want to be able to debug code at the library level or interfaces to lower level languages it helps to understand things like memory layout, registers, the call stack, etc.

My $.02.

And what, as American Citizens, would you have us do? Rise up in arms? Overthrow our government? I participate in the civil process, I encourage others to do so, I write my politicians when I'm concerned about specific issues. What else is there?

I agree the country is going to hell in a hand basket but fuck that "you get what you deserve" bullshit. Not everyone in this country lives on the fringe of political opinion; the majority do not. Yes, fuck our government for ignoring the will of the people but fuck you for your lack of compassion towards those people. Yes, some of them sit back and enjoy it or take it depending on their status but, again, most of them don't and are as appalled as you are at the state of this country.

And where are you from AC that's so much better? How did your country's people prevent this from happening? Any useful suggestions or did you just come to hate?

Me, I'll continue to participate in the political process, teach my children to do the same, encourage others to do so (whether I agree with them or not) and hope that eventually the process wins and the fuckers that are taking us down the tubes are finally voted out of office for good.

I'd add to that the karma system that keeps them from getting mod points and silencing others is also an important aspect. If we're going to allow for some light censorship (modding down to -1) we must also ensure that those doing the censoring are doing so responsibly and for legitimate reasons. (E.g. troll comments vs. I simply disagree with you)