Corporations aren't people.

Corporate personhood is an American concept and only applies to certain situations.

Not sure there has been a plethora in "recent" years. Vampires have always been popular. there are almost 2000 IMDB entries with the keyword "vampire".

The UK doesn't have a constitutional clause on freedom of speech. There is the Human Rights Act, which does take precedence over subsequent legislation (nit sure in the details - ask a legal expert), but freedom of speech is expected to be balanced against other rights in the act, and there are certain exceptions so it's nowhere near as absolute as the US first amendment. As such, campaign limits are perfectly legal in Britain.

It's bizarre how far the US has allowed this to go. I can understand that if a politician has a policy that will allow your company to benefit it makes sense that you'd want to help that politician win. It makes sense that you can announce the sort of policy that your company would support. But when it comes to the company going up to politicians and offering to support them on specific conditions, it's hard to see how this differs from bribery.

Yeah. These are the equivalent to french fries and PIN.

Sure, make Kirk the youngest CO ever. I'm cool with that. Right up until, apparently, there's not a single officer on the entire ship... except for Spock...

This is the part that I've never been able to resolve. Even if this is a case, and Kirk needs to take command, there's no reason for him to get permanently bumped up 4 ranks.

Abrams clearly wanted to have Kirk as captain of the Enterprise at the end of the movie, and have him as a cadet at the start, but that really wasn't going to be possible in a logical way.

In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped

Typically this sort of reduction will be accompanied by a public awareness campaign on the dangers of drink driving. I'm not totally convinced this is a good argument.

It's a defence though. I'm sure a competent lawyer would be able to make mincemeat out of it. It's pretty obvious that this sort of accusation would embarrass the accused file sharer. There's no need to name the person and you'd have to question why they worded their letter in a manner that sounds so much like a threat to embarrass them. I'm sure an actual lawyer could come up with other points.

I'm not a lawyer but my layman observation is that a lot of the time law is based on subjective judgements,and a lot more biased than a philosophical ideal would suggest.

The claim is it's the latter. But really, when you approach politicians individually, and tell them specifically what they need to support in order to get the funds, that claim seems to be less and less honest.

The cable company doesn't buy a bunch of channels and then sell them at a fixed markup. They charge what they think you'll pay.

Look at it like this - the cable channel offers "The Entertainment Channel" and "The Knitting Channel" as a package for $10 a month. Everyone wants the entertainment channel. Only a handful want the knitting channel.

They're forced to offer a la carte. Since 90% of their subscribers have no interest in knitting, we can assume that we can charge them $10 for the Entertainment channel on its own.

The reason they bundle the knitting channel is that a few subscribers don't think it's worth $10 for that alone. But for the bundle they'll pay the extra. The Knitting channel gets a trivial amount of the subscription fee.

Under the a la carte plan, you pay the same amount but get less, unless you're also a fan of knitting, in which case you pay $11.

How is this better?

This sort of thing is faked all the time, in the western world as well as North Korea. People like ceremonies. North Korea obviously either just wanted to impress the locals or thought they were better fakes than they are.

No, it's a good design decision. Why would anyone want their program to pay for something they don't use?

Simplifying development would be a good reason. This would be mitigated by making it an optional feature. Sure, you can argue all sorts of good reasons why this shouldn't be included, but more than once I've found myself cursing this omission.

If that kind of optimization is needed, people can use a string literal.

But then you're optimising. Not the compiler. And really this was just an example. I really think that a modern programming language without a built in string type is bizarre, and by the time C++ was introduced, the amount of string processing that programmers do was pretty well known. Retrofitting it is the wrong solution.

Not sure I'm convinced that exploiting an obvious glitch isn't hacking. Especially when part of the process involves manipulating the casino into enabling the feature. It's pretty obvious that this isn't intended behaviour and it's a glitch.

Also not convinced that it is wire fraud. Seems an odd charge to apply.

Yes, but the point is that it breaks the "you don't pay for what you don't use" design principle of C++.

If it prevents useful features from existing, this is a poor design decision. Plus, you'd only need to include it if it was actually used. It could even be added as an optional feature to classes.

You can't guarantee it. For example, if some library happens to use some kind of generic conversion function for its templated type, and you include the enum, then you've automatically dragged in a whole bunch of stuff.

This is a problem with the library. Not C++.

If the standard defines strings as a built-in type, you've just shifted the problem from the library to the compiler which doesn't fix anything.

string a = "hello ";
string b = "world";
string c = a + b;
int d = c.length();
return d;

The above code can optimise to {return 11;} if strings are built in. If it's a type then it involved allocating at least 3 chunks of memory and 2 memory copies.

I'd imagine this would be taken pretty seriously. Nevada regulated games pretty tightly, but the casinos want to provide an honest game. Their reputation matters, and they make a huge profit running honest games. A suggestion that they're cheating puts off a lot more honest players than they can win through a few glitches.

if they make reflection a feature of the language, then users pay for its performance penalties even though they don't use it.

Can be implemented as static members. Performance cost is a little bit of static data per class type.

Enum to string: same as above.

Not at all. If you don't use it then the string conversion function won't be linked.

While the std string library leaves a lot to be desired, I don't see why an inbuilt string type is needed.

Because the std::string type leaves a lot to be desired. A built in type means that the compiler is allowed to know what a string is and is and can handle strings differently for optimisation. It also means that we can have third party libraries that don't rely on an assumption that we're using the right std::string implementation.

I find if you think of templates as less powerful LISP macros that only works on types.

If I want that I'll add a lisp macro as a precompile step. Templates add a lot of complexity for limited benefit.