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Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 1) 78

Cppcheck apparently knows "hundreds of other rules covering a multitude of language aspects" so you don't "have to mentally apply against every single line of code you write."

Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 78

In the sort of places where MISRA and similar coding guides apply, yes, never allocating memory is expected, because once dynamic allocation exists you can't guarantee that you won't die with an out-of-memory error and similarly can't guarantee any time bounds on how long an alloc and dealloc will take.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

Comment Re: Is there anyone here that voted for Trump (Score 1) 249

It is hard to have fair democracy with winners take it all.

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

Comment Re:Jokes on you (Score 1) 249

Precisely none of those books were ever banned.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

Comment Competition? (Score 1) 41

We have W+ and Prime and these are probably the main 2 sites I cross-shop these days. They don't overlap entirely; Amazon sells a lot more variety under its own return policies etc, while Walmart is better for things like motor oil that they have locally (if you wanted to go into a Superstore). But there's enough overlap that it's worth cross-shopping, for now.

Comment Re:Make it free (Score 2) 250

One does wonder what they are thinking - why would anybody want or tolerate this?

Most ads we are stuck with because we want the media or service that the ads support. Oh, you want to watch two teams of 53 millionaires play football? OK, but 30% of your time will be watching ads.

On a fridge what is the payoff?

Comment Re:Every few years, a new canard (Score 3, Insightful) 205

Yeah, growing up in the cold war it was a foregone conclusion the commies would always lose because central planning doesn't work. You'd hear the story about a factory overflowing with left shoes and no matching right shoes were being made. I still think there is some truth to it, but China has been on a run for quite a while now. I am skeptical of any narrative in which a key element is them being very stupid.

Comment Re:Not going to work (Score 1) 137

Something that seems to constantly get lost in this discussion is that violent crime in the US is not particularly high right now by historical standards - e.g. murder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you were to ask the average "person on the street" to guess the murder rate, it would probably depend hugely on whether a school shooting or racially- or politically-motivated murder was currently a big media story. But that hardly corresponds to your risk as an individual.

Comment Re:What do they expect... (Score 1) 79

You're making a huge mistake by substituting your list of complaints for the actual question at hand - 'will I more likely be better off if I do or don't go to college.'

The answer is still quite clear. Look at this, the part about changing attitudes is interesting in some way, but the facts pertinent to somebody making this decision is the graph of median annual earnings for those with vs. without a college degree. People obsess over small relative shifts in this size of the gap, but it's nowhere near disappearing - it's huge. https://www.pewresearch.org/so...

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