You don't see a doctor or nurse getting dividends from their patients for the rest of their lives.

Once your illness is cured, why should the doctor get paid more? An author is paid by every reader of his book, so that's fair. Creative work is a lot harder and riskier than repetitive work of skilled/unskilled workers.

is morally wrong and offensive to everyone else who has to work every day for the rest of their lives

Bullshit. Many businesses require high upfront investment and then minor work to make a profit. Just because you slave everyday to earn living does not mean everyone else has to do the same.

People buy CPUs for their speed. The so-called fix for this massive bug eliminates a good chunk of the CPU speed that the consumer paid for. So the CPU is a lemon, and the consumer must be compensated somehow for using an inferior CPU.

Exactly. Elon Musk is making billions using the AC induction motor in his cars and trucks. However, the inventor of the AC motor, Nikola Tesla or is his estate, won't see a penny, thanks to patents being only 20 years long. If the patent system were fair, Tesla Corp. would pay a sales royalty of 5% that would further be divided up to pay all the inventions their cars use.

Patents are bait (set by the govt and big companies) to trick the working class person to do R&D for 10x to 100x his typical salary. Once the patent expires, the most efficient corporation (i.e., big corp) is going to take the patent and profit handsomely for centuries to come.

And since technology comes from science, inventors owe scientists some of the royalty they earn.

Here's a travel analogy: you want to meet a friend somewhere. You both want to meet far away from your homes. You buy a greyhound bus ticket (expense 1 of your post). He buys a plane ticket (expense 2 of your post).

Neither of those two expenses are unreasonable. However, expense 3 is superfluous. Therefore, it's double charging by the ISPs, but not triple charging.

Netflix is hurting the cable TV business and the cable tv operators want to use Ajit Pai to profit from TV over internet. This is to make up for the losses the internet has caused to their TV business.

The new "ISP internet plan" is like paying the amazon delivery company such as UPS or Fedex, a percentage more for the goods you buy. For example, you bought $500 in books on Amazon. According to Ajit Pai, you have to pay Fedex $50 extra (10% fee). That's what the new, greedy republican plan is.

Why would they plug their ears? Crying sounds like very high demand for the toys to the scalpers. So it's like music to their ears... (cha ching)

If you charge more, fewer people will buy (except during christmas when they will buy). If you produce more, retail and distributor space will get wasted (not sure who pays for that).

And there is still the risk that scalpers will buy up all the extra product even at higher prices and quantities. With a profit of almost $1,000, why wouldn't they?

So, it's only useful in the most commonly used software products to date, that in some cases is responsible for running all of those fancy "webapps" that everyone likes so much, and is used practically everywhere regardless as to the purpose of the program / user actually using it / proficiency required, and it's some how a niche area that's irrelevant?!?!? What a response, I have no words....

It's like an OS, something that is very important. Yet how many developers code OSes for a living or as a hobby? Extremely few. Let's see if Rust can unseat C++ from its throne since it is as fast as C++ with a lot of safety features. As efficient C++ is at runtime, it's badly designed for the programmer at development time.

If your software needs to rely on GC, then you're doing it wrong

Trying to figure out where any of the hundreds of dynamically allocated objects should be freed is something that should be automated, otherwise you end up with something like Firefox (a C++ app) -- a huge memory leaker that uses up GBs of RAM even if you have closed all the tabs.

This is the issue I have with these languages. They assume the developer is an idiot, and hand hold them to the point that they forget the limits and boundaries of the machine that they are programming. Then they want to know why their code keeps crashing when they get a NULL pointer in a for loop, and demand that the compiler fix it for them. I'd argue that we need to get rid of these languages.

Why use software programmers at all? Just do all your tasks in Verilog/VHDL hardware languages and manufacture ASIC chips using that code. Except nobody will do that, because it's expensive as hell (10000x or more costly). People are definitely going to use Python if it's 10x faster than C++ in development time for some simple task. C++ is now in a position that assembly used be many decades ago -- use it only if there is no other option. But unlike assembly, it's really badly designed.

You're a typical /. moron... assuming stuff without any proof. Thanks for lying, asshole.

How is this insightful? Desktop apps require GUI design and .net GUI design tools are excellent. Even the macos Xcode GUI design tools are far behind. With performance in par with Java, C# is a good choice for in-house apps with a good blend of development speed and app performance. /. mods are very biased.

I'd like that stolen battery life back please, you Code Monkey.

And the programmers who write your phone apps would like it very much not to waste 10x or 20x of time writing software in a half-low level and half-high level language like C++. That's why they use Java (Android) or Swift (iOS). Before Swift, programmers had to use Objective C, which is slow as hell in terms of app development time.

No, it's not. Few programmers work on projects that are millions of lines of code and it has to be as fast as possible (real-time).

For servers, memory is cheap ($200 extra) so you can just use Java for that 2 million LOC project.

That leaves C++ only for AI, professional games and large desktop apps (Photoshop, browsers, office etc.). While these types of software are used a lot, no more than 100,000 programmers are working on this, at any given time.

For in-house desktop apps of medium complexity (upto say 500k LOC), you can use C# or VB.net.

Even for games, where low time for development is paramount, the engine is written by one company in C++. Then dozens of other companies use that engine and Lua or some other scripting language to actually write the game quickly.

The remaining 95% programmers can use a sane programming language like C, Python, Swift, Java, Rust, Nim or even Go.

Bottom line: programmer time is money for the company and C++ probably has the 2nd highest cost per line of code compared to other languages (assembly language is 1st in cost/LOC).

And once you master it, there's limited benefits. It's useful for large, complex programs where speed is important. Examples are games, browsers, large desktop apps etc. That's it -- it's useful in a very small amount of software. For any other type of software, you can use C, Java, Python, Rust, Nim etc.

Languages like Rust (which is already used in browsers like Firefox) and Nim (which has a very efficient reference counting GC) are the future where performance is important. If you want high performance and an easy to use language, use Nim -- it's slower than C by about 20%, which is not bad. If your software cannot tolerate GC pauses, then use Rust although it's a lot harder to code than Nim.

ESR statements about Go are bogus. Go is a gimped version of Java although it is less verbose. If speed is not important in your app, use Python. Java has better features than Go (like exception handling) and similar GC performance.

After looking at the Portuguese ISP's plans, I'm outraged that they are stealing from the websites. The ISPs don't run the servers that provide the services, they did not write the code that powers those sites. They did nothing, except collect money from someone else's work.

It's like the Apple app store or google play store, where Apple and Google collect 30% of all app purchases even though did not write the app. But that's okay because they own those app stores and the OSes the apps run on.

The ISPs don't own the internet, they cannot charge a distribution fee like Apple's and Google's 30% cut.

Do you think there should be a different phone rate/minute when you transact $100,000 over the phone and when you talk to your relatives or friends? I don't think so. We're paying to rent their equipment to send data from party A to party B, regardless of what that voice data contains.

Non-neutrality == theft/extortion from website owners and users.

* Ada has a lot of type safety and yet no one uses it.
* Pascal has decent type-safety and yet only a few people use it.
* C is very weakly typed and plenty of people use it.
* Python and JS are strongly typed, but with weak static checks, and again have plenty of users.

Can we infer that programmers are lazy and prefer languages that "don't check too much?" Languages with fewer compile-time error messages seem to do better.

software slightly different, imho - but only if you dont believe software patents should exist in the first place.

You should know that almost all hardware is written and simulated in some language like C before it re-designed in a hardware description language (HDL) like Verilog. Yes, your magical hardware innovation (that deserves patenting) was born as some piece of C software initially. Yet, that C can only be patented if you transform/translate it to a language like Verilog.

Which points out to the BS that software should not be patentable.