Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).

But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.

Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.

I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.

While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.

It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.

*sympathy* You can't even call her up to the union like we did the cleaning lady... *LOL*

Takes a big man to call someone a liar over the internet with an anonymous user post, asswipe. You wouldn't have the BALLS to do that to my face.

It had nothing to do with a melange of overpriced and useless crap in the pages...

Why stop there, the vast majority of rapes take place within a 30 year window, according to your calculations 100% of women have been violently raped. Hell, let's push it up to 40, women who don't even exist have been raped.

The point you're missing is that the numbers used were exaggerated to illustrate the lunacy of feminist statistics, they don't resemble anything anyone sane might imagine as real.

And feel free to ignore the rest of the comment while you're at it, including the linked paper. Call that axe grinding if you like.

I hate to tell you this, but most people who've worked support in manufacturing and office environments have similar stories. I spent close to two months getting paged by Northern Telecom in Bramalea, ON for a manufacturing system failure on the shop floor at 2-3 AM most days per week. It was only by deciding to hang out for an entire night watching the area that I found out it was being caused by a cleaning lady unplugging the network bridge to plug in her radio while cleaning the area.

So seeing as I have one of those stories myself, I find them a lot easier to believe than most of you kids do.

Look at the actual crime reporting figures, locally rape convictions stand at around 8 per 100,000. Now let's get crazy and say only one in twenty rapes and or sexual assault charges result in a conviction. Let's get even crazier and say one in twenty people who are raped even report the matter. That leaves us with 3200 per 100,000, or about one in thirty. Still almost an order of magnitude smaller than feminist figures and almost certainly still a gigantic exaggeration.

So where do they come up with these moral panic inducing mountains of statistical tripe?

To understand this we have to look at the methods they use to take these surveys. Look at the technical reports. You'll find lots of stuff like:

Drafting the questionnaire, it was important to avoid terms such as ‘rape’, ‘violence’ or ‘stalking’, because different women might have different preconceived ideas on the types of violence usually associated with these terms, and the types of perpetrators involved.

Terms such as rape are left out of questionnaires and it's left to the researchers (all of whom happen to be feminist trained) to decide whether or not rape took place. So if someone answered that they were verbally abused using a sexual slur or had sex while drunk, it's the researcher who decides if the women was sexually attacked.

And take a look at California's shiny new feminist inspired affirmative consent laws if you want to know whether having sex after a drink is rape or not.

This gets further distorted by the public mouthpieces, who translate these numbers into 25% of all women were raped. No, they weren't. That one in four women in modern western democracies, one in forty was raped is not a prospect that the rational mind can entertain.

This is a technique that was pioneered by Mary Koss, a feminist researcher who decided that the official unbiased government reports weren't giving her the answers she wanted, so she set up her own surveys in order to amend the statistics accordingly.

Post survey examination of the outcomes however revealed that around three quarters of the women she identified as having been raped did not consider themselves victims of rape, and almost half of them had sex with their supposed attackers after the event identified as a rape had occurred, and continued dating them.

So, having internalised that, now you'll have to start asking questions like "how did these flim flam artists manage to pull the wool over everyone's eyes for 40 years" and "why are people in power listening to them" and so on. These are good questions to ponder. While you're pondering them some light reading for you:

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/...

One random guy being sent photos does not a gender issue make. If you want to talk about gender issues maybe we can talk about the actual epidemic of female teachers raping male and female students in high schools, how about that for a conversation we need to have. Because that's what happens when you create a narrative that puts people into jobs based on their genitalia instead of their merit. You sanctimonious little pricks speak only, and I do mean only, for your revolting little cult.

Nobody's ever said harassment didn't exist. It does, as does rape, murder, fraud, and pickpocketing. Usually perpetrated by psychos and disturbed individuals.

Psychos and seriously disturbed people also exist, of course - unfortunately some of them seem to think that there's an enormous epidemic of rape and harassment.

I feel sorry for all of you south of the border. Verizon was, without exception, the worst telco I ever dealt with as far as internet goes. When Canada was rolling out DSL and cable like crazy, Verizon in Delaware was offering up 28.8 dial-up. No options. No choices. That's all you could get. You couldn't even use a 56K modem because they used the high compression voice codecs on their lines, and you couldn't get a data line. You couldn't even get ISDN if you were willing to pay for it. :(

It stayed slow after re-entering the normal environment though.

They don't provide complete functionality. Instead they put you in a position where making even minor changes that the framework developers didn't foresee usually involves far more time than you had planned on spending, and likely far more skill than you possess if you're still using frameworks.

Personally I prefer to give my clients what they ask for instead of trying to convince them they don't want something that will cause me a lot of trouble to put together. I can do that because I understand the underlying code.

And for bonus points, you don't have to relearn the underlying code over and over, as you do with ever shifting frameworks, and your knowledge doesn't become obsolete when a framework falls out of fashion.

It's not even a great sales pitch, I have zero interest in what my toaster has to say.

Yeah this is the dream of a sociopath who imagines himself a god, and I'm not even using hyperbole.

Does it scare you that such a person has so much power already? Because it scares me.