The Australian is the local NEWS Corp. paper. Rupert essentially on record as saying that the internet is a bad idea...

> So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with filtering it.

Totally wrong: there is *no* other "media" that is actively filtered, based either on content or source. That is what is different about this proposal. All other media comply with the legislation (mostly) because they'll get into trouble with the law if they don't. That is *good enough*.

> I mean hell, it's already illegal to *host* this sort of content in Australia.

Exactly. It's illegal essentially everywhere. Let the police get on with their job. Encourage them. Fund them with the proceeds of this policy, if you like. The police don't care what protocols you're using to break the law, and are therefore future-proof and much harder to circumvent.

Java the language may or may not be cool, but Java the platform has exactly the problem Jobs is talking about: a closed API set that doesn't offer *any* access to the underlying Cocoa framework, because to do so would prevent "compiling once and running anywhere". This inability to use platform-native APIs is why Java is the programming ghetto that it is, and why Android's use of Java is not allowed to call itself Java: they like the language, but want to offer platform-appropriate (their own) APIs, rather than J2ME or whatever.

Since when does DTD or CSS file creation involve "a map of metacodes found in the document" such that "the map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document". I doubt that is what Microsoft have done, because, well, who would? It means that this map needs to be regenerated after every edit of the document, which means that this isn't terribly useful or document-independent meta-information...

That summary makes it sound as though the company invented DTDs, after seeing HTML (which had them, sort-of), and in ignorance of all of the processing that was already being done in SGML in the years before. This is clearly rubbish. The pre-existence of document formatting with SGML must make the patent's claims very narrow. (not that I've read them.)

Read the report: it's not accurate in any useful or unexpected sense: it blocks the URLs that are on the block list. Neat, huh? They just get to make a claim with a pretty, round number.

What on earth do you need multiple inheritance, virtual functions and templates for if you're writing a memory management system or interrupt handler?

The problem with C++ is that it keeps C++ programmers from moving on to more productive languages with more support for real abstractions, by having them believe that they should use it to write the tiny amount of code that would be better written in C.

Get over it: you've got a perfectly useful set of interrupt handlers and memory management in your favourite OS and runtime. Write the useful code in something that will *leverage* that, rather than re-inventing it over and over again.

I guess this is a give-away that my Dad is an engineer. I started with plastic meccano, moved on to metal meccano and fischertechnik before ever encountering Lego (which was hugely uninteresting in comparison.)
Model aeroplanes had a look in there, too. Once upon a time model cars and aeroplanes came in cereal packets (around the time of plastic spacemen). The ones that you build out of balsa and laquered paper are better though: they can fly, and you can cut yourself quite badly with the scalpels and other knives that you use to cut the pieces of wood :-)