I mean, there are no roads where you can safely and legally drive it at its top speed, so you may as well get a Mazda MX-5. Similarly; every single time there is a new graphics card out, the Slashdot response is the same. "Who needs this? There is minimal difference between this and this! Are there any games taking advantage of this?"
If you have the money and your an avid gamer, why not? If you can afford to spend $500 on a graphics card every year, I'm sure you also have a top notch monitor with a massive resolution. Also, I'm sure there is always another setting you can switch on in Crysis N. Most of the people who buy these cards aren't suckers. They know a card won't provide them with 3x as much enjoyment even though it costs 3x as much. They simply can afford to stay above the affordability sweetspot.
They also pave the way for the rest of us and ensure that there will be a card next year which does the same for half the price.
I can't help but think this reaction is mostly about penis^H^H^H^H^Hgraphics card envy.
In many markets Google has a near monopoly position. Their global smart phone market share is around 80% and in some markets it's even higher. Bundling an office suite in order to leverage their dominant operating system is unlikely to sit well with regulators.
Bullshit. Just like one should never mod down people one simply disagrees with, you should never have been modded up, because your argument is extremely flawed. There are good arguments against single-payer health care systems, but you failed to mention any of them, so I can only assume you got modded up by people disliking universal health care.
Point of a gun?? GTFO. A doctor in a single-payer universal health care system is a well-payed individual employed or contracted by the government. Nobody is forcing that person to work for the health care system. Instead their salay is high enough that it becomes attractive to be a doctor, causing people to seek out medical training and become doctors on their own accord. No gun or coercion is involved at any point. You do have to follow the rules of your employer (and thus treat patients you don't like) or risk getting fired, but then you are free to seek out a different profession.
Your other point is also ridiculous. Treatments often cost more than $10,000 in a single payer system. We then get to the hyperbolic and shambolic argument about death panels. This argument baffles me, as there is considerably more of an argument for profit-driven insurance companies operating by "death-panels" (or individual death-deciders). And finally; I hope you realise that univeral health care does not stop you from taking your wealth to pay a private surgeon if you want to so you present a false choice.
"Normally the ODM also designs the laptop while the vendor just provides the specs and requirements, so I'm not even sure if Apple even designs the Macbooks."
You may not be sure, but the rest of us are. Like all Macs the Macbook carries the typical "Designed in California by Apple" tag. For all the faults of Apple, having "generic/beige box" design is not one of them. Also, I disagree that it is "pointless" arguing build quality based on brand name. Different brands spec different quality components to the ODMs and the spec is really quite detailed. Obviously some problems and merits are inherit in each ODM and clearly have a large impact on the outcome, but the Brand clearly has a say in quality.
When they can make graphics which is indistinguishable from "real life" at a resolution where you can no longer see the pixels and which behaves with physics resembling real life, then we can start talking.
Currently we are way off with respect to shapes, lighting, textures, resolution, physics, animation... basically all of it.
Shapes are never fully "curved" looking due to insufficient polygon counts. When the polygon sizes start becoming smaller than the pixel counts, maybe this will be ok. We use rasterisation for lighting, which is far from sufficiently realistic. Global illumination and shadows are still a problem. Textures are still too small and more importantly not "3D" enough. Ideally we would model light reflecting and passing through actual material structures. Resolution is still an issue. We're not doing real time 3D rendering on "retina" displays of decent sizes. We're waaaaay off with regards to physics. Water, smoke, fire, explosions are never realistic enough (ideally we'd use CFD for this). We also are terribly far away when it comes to destructable environments. We are many orders of magnitude off "good enough" on almost all accounts and just solving one of these points would require an order of magnitude better hardware.
The reason you can play any game at 1200p resolution is a stagnation in graphics development in games, not least due to consoles updated every 8 years dominating.
so how are you going to feel if someone spoofs your Bluetooth ID at the scene of a crime and you don't, have an alibi?
There, fixed it for you. If you're going to make that argument you may as well do it honestly. The difference between if and when is probably more than 99.999% in terms of probability. For many, this would completely change their position in an argument.
Publicly they've claimed to want to maintain the NHS, but every single policy has been towards further privatisation, with the ultimate goal being that people "pay their own dues". They are the closest thing you'll find in Britain to the Republicans, but they know they wouldn't get elected if they publicly admitted to this, so they lied and a lot of people have been fooled.
That said. Norway's national health service (and I've just moved back here) is not free at the point of service. Everyone pays approximately $30 per GP consultation and something like $50-100 for a specialist appointment. Unless you're a child (in which case everything is free) or get a "free card" or if it is an emergency (in which case I've never heard anyone get charged).
A free card you get either for being unemployed, on benefits, or if you simply have alread spent more than about $300 on medical bills that year. So a few hundred dollars is the most anyone will spend on health care appointments in a year.
I find this to be a reasonable compromise and it does stop a lot of people from going to their GP "frivolously" and will thus save the health service a considerable amount of money. My only concern is that patients aren't necessarily the greatest judge of what is "frivolous". Men, in particularly, can take a long time going to the GP because they're sure "it's nothing". I'd hate for genuinely ill people to not turn up to the GP because they don't want to waste $30.
Tablets and smartphones stopped being exciting 3-4 years ago. Now they are reliable, established tech with minor improvements every year.
Every major technology goes through the same cycle; they start off as innovative, exciting and new (and scary to some), then they gradually improve and become reliable and established. Once your mother has startet using them, they are most definitely no longer exciting.
Luckily we live in an age where there's always another exciting new thing around the corner.
Please mod down my post above; I had misunderstood the situation. The "loop hole" in question seems to have been a government encouraged benefit, more or less the same as the child care vouchers. If child care vouchers later turned out to be illegal under some EU regulation which the UK government had misinterpreted, then going after all the users for tax evasion would have been terrible.
To clarify. My post is about the principle of retroactive legislation and tax loop holes; not about this current case, which seems rather special in that the businesses followed state accepted (and encouraged rules) for tax management created to stimulate startups. That these rules later turned out to be unconstitutional is not the fault of the businesses, but the fault of the state government creating a poor state law.
The businesses have thus broken the law, but in this specific case the right thing to do is to give them amnesty because it was done unwittingly, they had no criminal intent and acted in good faith, based on a law which could not be legally upheld.
It is imporant not to treat this as a general rule though. The case was very specific. If you search for unintended loop holes and exploit these for your own benefit, you must take the risk that you are wrong about the legality of the loop hole.
I've used two legal forms of tax "management" in the UK; child care vouchers (vouchers taken before tax to pay for child care costs) and the "salary sacrifice scheme" (where your employer pays your national insurance for you, causing your taxable income to become lower).
The difference is that these were both understood (and in the case of child care vouchers an actively encouraged benefit) to be legal by all parties; employers, employees and the government.
If you actively seek out loop holes for yourself in a clever attempt to be "smarter" than the government in order to pay less tax and it later turns out that you weren't (and your loop hole was in fact illegal tax evasion), then you should not be able to get away with it. Ignorance is not a defence, and you took a calculated risk.
Hang on. Courts don't have law making ability (*). That is up to the elected government. If a court closed a loop hole, it just means it was already illegal and the court has simply decided how the law should be interpreted. When assholes use shady loopholes to benefit themselves, they may have believed it to legal, but they run the risk of that loophole turning out to be illegal after all (and ignorance is not a defence). If a court later concludes that the practise was indeed illegal, going after them is not "Ex Post Facto" or retroactive legislation.
(*) Granted they do have the ability to create presedence, and may change commonly understood interpretations of the law. This, may in practise, appear pretty close to defining new law.
Some places, not others, and how much you tip depends entirely on the level of service. Answering with a single example for "us" and "we" may give our American cousins the impression we're a uniform lot. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the UK, service is typically not included in the bill and a tip of around 10% is expected on table service. There, a steak with chips in a pub typically costs £10 (~ $16 / EUR 12) and the person serving you may earn as little as half that per hour, before tips.
In Norway, service IS included in the bill and here a burger costs twice as much and the person serving you earns ~ $24 / EUR 17 per hour in starter wage without any formal qualifications. Thus, tips in Norway are completely optional. In Norway, I personally tip only if the service is better than expected. That is, they've been particularly helpful and attentitive.
To be fair. Jobs was 26 years old in 1981. He may have learnt something during the 15 years until he rejoined Apple. Perhaps this particular tale helped him be somewhat more sensible in his choices of what to stick his nose in? The story also demonstrates that he was also willing to be proven wrong, which he was, and they moved on from there.
... possibly because the summary does a very poor job of representing the article, by leaving out the most important part of it.
The elderly are not overall more willing to take risks, it is just that the risks they are taking are different and less consistent. If faced with potential earnings, they'd rather take smaller guaranteed earnings than larger and riskier earnings; exactly the sort of stereotype of the cautious elderly you'd expect.
But if faced with losses they'd rather take the risk of a much bigger loss than the guaranteed loss.
My interpretation is that they are so afraid of losses they'll do anything to avoid them, even irrationally gambling to avoid loss. This sort of fits with the stereotype of keeping money in your mattress to avoid losses in bank charges and taxes, despite the fact that one single fire or robbery would ruin you.
If you figure you only have 5 to 10 more years left why not take a little more risk. When you have 50 years left to regret the choice it makes more sense to take less risk.
Because rather than being moderately comfortable, you may end up spending your last 5 years desperately poor and struggling, with no chance of digging yourself out of that hole. You are at the end game and you have no more room for "learning experiences" when it comes to your finances.
Spending your last few years in abject poverty is a legitimate fear for many. When you are 35 and make a bad investment, you at least have 30 years of active work left to dig yourself out of the hole you got yourself into.
For what it is worth, the grandparent probably went too far. But it seems pretty clear Israel don't want any peace with the Palestinians. If they really wanted peace, they wouldn't continuously make that peace harder and harder to achieve, by creating settlements further and further into the occupied territories. They know they are winning and are showing no sign of wanting to stop.
When I have been part of interviewing new hires, I've tended to ask this question: "what do you find frustrating about C++?"
If you really know C++, there are bound to be at least a few things that you find frustrating. The lack of standardisation on binary interfaces, the continued drive for flexibility at all costs (resulting in a million ways to do one simple thing) and the way they have ALWAYS emphasised pattern clutches over improving the language. Despite (or perhaps because of) the near-complete lack of ABI compatibility between versions, they nearly never remove or depricate anything in the the standard or the STL API, meaning any new "simplification" always comes in addition to the old way, it never replaces it. Sadly this means the standard is never actually simplified, they just add yet another layer of abstraction, which always leaks. Lots of the STL and the standard patterns used by C++ developers are really clever and I'm sure they were intensily satisfying to develop. But satisfying cleverness is not necessarily something to build a programming language on.
The worst part is that the patterns and algorithms which were developed to work around gaps in the core language actually become arguments not to improve the core language. Let's face it; as much as I've used std::for_each, it should never have existed. Instead, range-based for-loops should have been in way before C++11.
That said. There is no other language with such easy access to such a myriad of great libraries out there, especially for science/engineering/visualisation, and for this reason I cannot agree with the FQA's notion that there are no reason to start new projects in C++. By using these libraries, your own code could well become quite elegant and you would shoot yourself in the foot if you decided to avoid C++ on principle for a situation where C++ and its large set of libraries would solve your problem.
There's still some excellent stuff on the BBC, but I do at least partially agree with you. The BBC has been chasing ratings too hard for too long.
The worst part is when they very nearly shut 6 Music because it didn't have enough listeners, when it was the only radio station catering for those who were really into their modern music. I.e. really top quality, but not necessarily commercially viable. Exactly the sort of thing the BBC should produce. Thank Deity they failed and their attempt actually turned into a fantastic advertisment for 6 Music ("Listen to us before it's too late") which massively boosted their listener base.
But I disagree that they shouldn't compete with commercial channels at all. Mass market productions are a hugely important way for the BBC to reach people who may otherwise never have seen the good stuff the BBC does. Large parts of their potential audience would never even have heard about their quality productions if it wasn't for mass-market productions.
I also totally oppose the idea that the commercialism of the BBC is an argument against public broadcasting and the licensing fee. If the BBC has become too commercial (it has), then it should be reigned in and told to refocus more on the education aspect. Abolishing the license fee is the only sure way of making everything commercial.
The BBC just need to remember that the mass market productions are not the goal, they are the teasers that allow the BBC to produce their educational stuff.
The parent wrote nothing to suggest he isn't fully aware that you can list on the NYSE without being incorporated in the US.
You, however, seem not to understand the most important thing about large international corporations; regardless of where they are from, or where they have been "incorporated", they can and often do, move location. If it is more profitable to run the company abroad, the only possible thing that can keep them in their native country is sentiment from the owners. If the owners are all american, they won't give one iota about the finnish roots of the company.
Listing Nokia on the NYSE was to attract US investors. They succeeded in that, but at the same time (obviously) diluted finnish ownership.
"I mean an external debug tool that can hex dump and disassemble."
Good luck with that. We're talking about millions of code lines resulting in even more millions of lines of assembly, which has been automatically optimised and thus aren't exactly the same as the direct translation of the C++ code to assembler. Furthermore, you have to do this without knowing what you are looking for, or even if anything wrong exists. Debugging the Linux kernel to find the problem would be near impossible, because you'd have to actually match the exact conditions the backdoor appears in order to find it in the debugger.
Debugging the compiler would be your best bet and theoretically you could quite easily match the conditions in compiling the new production version of GCC, but you'd have to go through it step by step to figure out whether it is doing the expected thing for your optimisation level.
You may as well just study the disassembled code line by line to work out if it is the expected output from compiling the new version of GCC with the exact version of GCC you already have.
It would only disappear temporarily until you again used the malign production compiler to compile a new production version of the compiler.
If you compile the next production compiler with the last development compiler (which in turn has been compiled with the previous iteration of development compiler) you risk spreading bugs which aren't actually in the source code of the compiler anymore. This carries it's own problems. You also risk making the next stable version of GCC impossible to compile with the previous stable version of GCC.
Without knowing this for sure, I would strongly suspect that the final production version of the RHEL 7.x GCC compiler is actually compiled with the last production version of the RHEL 6.x compiler.
There are a lot of interesting solutions to this problem in the thread following my post, but none of them actually contain any evidence that any of these solutions are actually used by Red Hat, Debian, Canonical, etc.
Why large, wealthy individual shareholders would be fine with this, I don't know. They should be screaming out to protect their interests, so I can only assume that they sold out a long time ago and are now actually shorting the company.
But most other shareholders are either tiny, with almost no say, or they are shareholders through large third party funds. And the CEOs of those large third party funds are tightly linked with the CEOs of the companies in question. They all skim as much as they can off the shared wealth.
Someone would have found it with a debugger. Sure, they could change the compiler to insert code into a debugger to hide the patch. But this rapidly gets so complex and error-prone that the bloat would be noticed and it would fail to spot all debuggers and patch them all. It's an interesting theoretical attack, but not practical in the long run.
Not at all. You only apply the "patch" when debugging symbols are off and optimisation is on, which would cover nearly any production build. Even if you left in debugging symbols, you would still have a hard time discovering it with a debugger since optimisation is supposed do change the output.
You would also make it trigger under very special circumstances and as others have pointed out, the error you introduce could be a subtle change of behaviour of the random number generator.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, there are no roads where you can safely and legally drive it at its top speed, so you may as well get a Mazda MX-5. Similarly; every single time there is a new graphics card out, the Slashdot response is the same. "Who needs this? There is minimal difference between this and this! Are there any games taking advantage of this?"
If you have the money and your an avid gamer, why not? If you can afford to spend $500 on a graphics card every year, I'm sure you also have a top notch monitor with a massive resolution. Also, I'm sure there is always another setting you can switch on in Crysis N. Most of the people who buy these cards aren't suckers. They know a card won't provide them with 3x as much enjoyment even though it costs 3x as much. They simply can afford to stay above the affordability sweetspot.
They also pave the way for the rest of us and ensure that there will be a card next year which does the same for half the price.
I can't help but think this reaction is mostly about penis^H^H^H^H^Hgraphics card envy.
In many markets Google has a near monopoly position. Their global smart phone market share is around 80% and in some markets it's even higher. Bundling an office suite in order to leverage their dominant operating system is unlikely to sit well with regulators.
Bullshit. Just like one should never mod down people one simply disagrees with, you should never have been modded up, because your argument is extremely flawed. There are good arguments against single-payer health care systems, but you failed to mention any of them, so I can only assume you got modded up by people disliking universal health care.
Point of a gun?? GTFO. A doctor in a single-payer universal health care system is a well-payed individual employed or contracted by the government. Nobody is forcing that person to work for the health care system. Instead their salay is high enough that it becomes attractive to be a doctor, causing people to seek out medical training and become doctors on their own accord. No gun or coercion is involved at any point. You do have to follow the rules of your employer (and thus treat patients you don't like) or risk getting fired, but then you are free to seek out a different profession.
Your other point is also ridiculous. Treatments often cost more than $10,000 in a single payer system. We then get to the hyperbolic and shambolic argument about death panels. This argument baffles me, as there is considerably more of an argument for profit-driven insurance companies operating by "death-panels" (or individual death-deciders). And finally; I hope you realise that univeral health care does not stop you from taking your wealth to pay a private surgeon if you want to so you present a false choice.
Moderators: shape up.
"Normally the ODM also designs the laptop while the vendor just provides the specs and requirements, so I'm not even sure if Apple even designs the Macbooks."
You may not be sure, but the rest of us are. Like all Macs the Macbook carries the typical "Designed in California by Apple" tag. For all the faults of Apple, having "generic/beige box" design is not one of them. Also, I disagree that it is "pointless" arguing build quality based on brand name. Different brands spec different quality components to the ODMs and the spec is really quite detailed. Obviously some problems and merits are inherit in each ODM and clearly have a large impact on the outcome, but the Brand clearly has a say in quality.
When they can make graphics which is indistinguishable from "real life" at a resolution where you can no longer see the pixels and which behaves with physics resembling real life, then we can start talking.
Currently we are way off with respect to shapes, lighting, textures, resolution, physics, animation... basically all of it.
Shapes are never fully "curved" looking due to insufficient polygon counts. When the polygon sizes start becoming smaller than the pixel counts, maybe this will be ok. We use rasterisation for lighting, which is far from sufficiently realistic. Global illumination and shadows are still a problem. Textures are still too small and more importantly not "3D" enough. Ideally we would model light reflecting and passing through actual material structures. Resolution is still an issue. We're not doing real time 3D rendering on "retina" displays of decent sizes. We're waaaaay off with regards to physics. Water, smoke, fire, explosions are never realistic enough (ideally we'd use CFD for this). We also are terribly far away when it comes to destructable environments. We are many orders of magnitude off "good enough" on almost all accounts and just solving one of these points would require an order of magnitude better hardware.
The reason you can play any game at 1200p resolution is a stagnation in graphics development in games, not least due to consoles updated every 8 years dominating.
so how are you going to feel if someone spoofs your Bluetooth ID at the scene of a crime and you don't, have an alibi?
There, fixed it for you. If you're going to make that argument you may as well do it honestly. The difference between if and when is probably more than 99.999% in terms of probability. For many, this would completely change their position in an argument.
Publicly they've claimed to want to maintain the NHS, but every single policy has been towards further privatisation, with the ultimate goal being that people "pay their own dues". They are the closest thing you'll find in Britain to the Republicans, but they know they wouldn't get elected if they publicly admitted to this, so they lied and a lot of people have been fooled.
That said. Norway's national health service (and I've just moved back here) is not free at the point of service. Everyone pays approximately $30 per GP consultation and something like $50-100 for a specialist appointment. Unless you're a child (in which case everything is free) or get a "free card" or if it is an emergency (in which case I've never heard anyone get charged).
A free card you get either for being unemployed, on benefits, or if you simply have alread spent more than about $300 on medical bills that year. So a few hundred dollars is the most anyone will spend on health care appointments in a year.
I find this to be a reasonable compromise and it does stop a lot of people from going to their GP "frivolously" and will thus save the health service a considerable amount of money. My only concern is that patients aren't necessarily the greatest judge of what is "frivolous". Men, in particularly, can take a long time going to the GP because they're sure "it's nothing". I'd hate for genuinely ill people to not turn up to the GP because they don't want to waste $30.
Tablets and smartphones stopped being exciting 3-4 years ago. Now they are reliable, established tech with minor improvements every year.
Every major technology goes through the same cycle; they start off as innovative, exciting and new (and scary to some), then they gradually improve and become reliable and established. Once your mother has startet using them, they are most definitely no longer exciting.
Luckily we live in an age where there's always another exciting new thing around the corner.
Please mod down my post above; I had misunderstood the situation. The "loop hole" in question seems to have been a government encouraged benefit, more or less the same as the child care vouchers. If child care vouchers later turned out to be illegal under some EU regulation which the UK government had misinterpreted, then going after all the users for tax evasion would have been terrible.
To clarify. My post is about the principle of retroactive legislation and tax loop holes; not about this current case, which seems rather special in that the businesses followed state accepted (and encouraged rules) for tax management created to stimulate startups. That these rules later turned out to be unconstitutional is not the fault of the businesses, but the fault of the state government creating a poor state law.
The businesses have thus broken the law, but in this specific case the right thing to do is to give them amnesty because it was done unwittingly, they had no criminal intent and acted in good faith, based on a law which could not be legally upheld.
It is imporant not to treat this as a general rule though. The case was very specific. If you search for unintended loop holes and exploit these for your own benefit, you must take the risk that you are wrong about the legality of the loop hole.
I've used two legal forms of tax "management" in the UK; child care vouchers (vouchers taken before tax to pay for child care costs) and the "salary sacrifice scheme" (where your employer pays your national insurance for you, causing your taxable income to become lower).
The difference is that these were both understood (and in the case of child care vouchers an actively encouraged benefit) to be legal by all parties; employers, employees and the government.
If you actively seek out loop holes for yourself in a clever attempt to be "smarter" than the government in order to pay less tax and it later turns out that you weren't (and your loop hole was in fact illegal tax evasion), then you should not be able to get away with it. Ignorance is not a defence, and you took a calculated risk.
Hang on. Courts don't have law making ability (*). That is up to the elected government. If a court closed a loop hole, it just means it was already illegal and the court has simply decided how the law should be interpreted. When assholes use shady loopholes to benefit themselves, they may have believed it to legal, but they run the risk of that loophole turning out to be illegal after all (and ignorance is not a defence). If a court later concludes that the practise was indeed illegal, going after them is not "Ex Post Facto" or retroactive legislation.
(*) Granted they do have the ability to create presedence, and may change commonly understood interpretations of the law. This, may in practise, appear pretty close to defining new law.
"We still give tips."
Some places, not others, and how much you tip depends entirely on the level of service. Answering with a single example for "us" and "we" may give our American cousins the impression we're a uniform lot. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the UK, service is typically not included in the bill and a tip of around 10% is expected on table service. There, a steak with chips in a pub typically costs £10 (~ $16 / EUR 12) and the person serving you may earn as little as half that per hour, before tips.
In Norway, service IS included in the bill and here a burger costs twice as much and the person serving you earns ~ $24 / EUR 17 per hour in starter wage without any formal qualifications. Thus, tips in Norway are completely optional. In Norway, I personally tip only if the service is better than expected. That is, they've been particularly helpful and attentitive.
To be fair. Jobs was 26 years old in 1981. He may have learnt something during the 15 years until he rejoined Apple. Perhaps this particular tale helped him be somewhat more sensible in his choices of what to stick his nose in? The story also demonstrates that he was also willing to be proven wrong, which he was, and they moved on from there.
... possibly because the summary does a very poor job of representing the article, by leaving out the most important part of it.
The elderly are not overall more willing to take risks, it is just that the risks they are taking are different and less consistent. If faced with potential earnings, they'd rather take smaller guaranteed earnings than larger and riskier earnings; exactly the sort of stereotype of the cautious elderly you'd expect.
But if faced with losses they'd rather take the risk of a much bigger loss than the guaranteed loss.
My interpretation is that they are so afraid of losses they'll do anything to avoid them, even irrationally gambling to avoid loss. This sort of fits with the stereotype of keeping money in your mattress to avoid losses in bank charges and taxes, despite the fact that one single fire or robbery would ruin you.
If you figure you only have 5 to 10 more years left why not take a little more risk. When you have 50 years left to regret the choice it makes more sense to take less risk.
Because rather than being moderately comfortable, you may end up spending your last 5 years desperately poor and struggling, with no chance of digging yourself out of that hole. You are at the end game and you have no more room for "learning experiences" when it comes to your finances.
Spending your last few years in abject poverty is a legitimate fear for many. When you are 35 and make a bad investment, you at least have 30 years of active work left to dig yourself out of the hole you got yourself into.
For what it is worth, the grandparent probably went too far. But it seems pretty clear Israel don't want any peace with the Palestinians. If they really wanted peace, they wouldn't continuously make that peace harder and harder to achieve, by creating settlements further and further into the occupied territories. They know they are winning and are showing no sign of wanting to stop.
When I have been part of interviewing new hires, I've tended to ask this question: "what do you find frustrating about C++?"
If you really know C++, there are bound to be at least a few things that you find frustrating. The lack of standardisation on binary interfaces, the continued drive for flexibility at all costs (resulting in a million ways to do one simple thing) and the way they have ALWAYS emphasised pattern clutches over improving the language. Despite (or perhaps because of) the near-complete lack of ABI compatibility between versions, they nearly never remove or depricate anything in the the standard or the STL API, meaning any new "simplification" always comes in addition to the old way, it never replaces it. Sadly this means the standard is never actually simplified, they just add yet another layer of abstraction, which always leaks. Lots of the STL and the standard patterns used by C++ developers are really clever and I'm sure they were intensily satisfying to develop. But satisfying cleverness is not necessarily something to build a programming language on.
The worst part is that the patterns and algorithms which were developed to work around gaps in the core language actually become arguments not to improve the core language. Let's face it; as much as I've used std::for_each, it should never have existed. Instead, range-based for-loops should have been in way before C++11.
The c++ FQA sums up some of my own frustrations.
That said. There is no other language with such easy access to such a myriad of great libraries out there, especially for science/engineering/visualisation, and for this reason I cannot agree with the FQA's notion that there are no reason to start new projects in C++. By using these libraries, your own code could well become quite elegant and you would shoot yourself in the foot if you decided to avoid C++ on principle for a situation where C++ and its large set of libraries would solve your problem.
There's still some excellent stuff on the BBC, but I do at least partially agree with you. The BBC has been chasing ratings too hard for too long.
The worst part is when they very nearly shut 6 Music because it didn't have enough listeners, when it was the only radio station catering for those who were really into their modern music. I.e. really top quality, but not necessarily commercially viable. Exactly the sort of thing the BBC should produce. Thank Deity they failed and their attempt actually turned into a fantastic advertisment for 6 Music ("Listen to us before it's too late") which massively boosted their listener base.
But I disagree that they shouldn't compete with commercial channels at all. Mass market productions are a hugely important way for the BBC to reach people who may otherwise never have seen the good stuff the BBC does. Large parts of their potential audience would never even have heard about their quality productions if it wasn't for mass-market productions.
I also totally oppose the idea that the commercialism of the BBC is an argument against public broadcasting and the licensing fee. If the BBC has become too commercial (it has), then it should be reigned in and told to refocus more on the education aspect. Abolishing the license fee is the only sure way of making everything commercial.
The BBC just need to remember that the mass market productions are not the goal, they are the teasers that allow the BBC to produce their educational stuff.
The parent wrote nothing to suggest he isn't fully aware that you can list on the NYSE without being incorporated in the US.
You, however, seem not to understand the most important thing about large international corporations; regardless of where they are from, or where they have been "incorporated", they can and often do, move location. If it is more profitable to run the company abroad, the only possible thing that can keep them in their native country is sentiment from the owners. If the owners are all american, they won't give one iota about the finnish roots of the company.
Listing Nokia on the NYSE was to attract US investors. They succeeded in that, but at the same time (obviously) diluted finnish ownership.
"I mean an external debug tool that can hex dump and disassemble."
Good luck with that. We're talking about millions of code lines resulting in even more millions of lines of assembly, which has been automatically optimised and thus aren't exactly the same as the direct translation of the C++ code to assembler. Furthermore, you have to do this without knowing what you are looking for, or even if anything wrong exists. Debugging the Linux kernel to find the problem would be near impossible, because you'd have to actually match the exact conditions the backdoor appears in order to find it in the debugger.
Debugging the compiler would be your best bet and theoretically you could quite easily match the conditions in compiling the new production version of GCC, but you'd have to go through it step by step to figure out whether it is doing the expected thing for your optimisation level.
You may as well just study the disassembled code line by line to work out if it is the expected output from compiling the new version of GCC with the exact version of GCC you already have.
The problem is only solved if anyone does this. Scratch that, everyone does this.
Bingo!
It would only disappear temporarily until you again used the malign production compiler to compile a new production version of the compiler.
If you compile the next production compiler with the last development compiler (which in turn has been compiled with the previous iteration of development compiler) you risk spreading bugs which aren't actually in the source code of the compiler anymore. This carries it's own problems. You also risk making the next stable version of GCC impossible to compile with the previous stable version of GCC.
Without knowing this for sure, I would strongly suspect that the final production version of the RHEL 7.x GCC compiler is actually compiled with the last production version of the RHEL 6.x compiler.
There are a lot of interesting solutions to this problem in the thread following my post, but none of them actually contain any evidence that any of these solutions are actually used by Red Hat, Debian, Canonical, etc.
Why large, wealthy individual shareholders would be fine with this, I don't know. They should be screaming out to protect their interests, so I can only assume that they sold out a long time ago and are now actually shorting the company.
But most other shareholders are either tiny, with almost no say, or they are shareholders through large third party funds. And the CEOs of those large third party funds are tightly linked with the CEOs of the companies in question. They all skim as much as they can off the shared wealth.
Someone would have found it with a debugger. Sure, they could change the compiler to insert code into a debugger to hide the patch. But this rapidly gets so complex and error-prone that the bloat would be noticed and it would fail to spot all debuggers and patch them all. It's an interesting theoretical attack, but not practical in the long run.
Not at all. You only apply the "patch" when debugging symbols are off and optimisation is on, which would cover nearly any production build. Even if you left in debugging symbols, you would still have a hard time discovering it with a debugger since optimisation is supposed do change the output.
You would also make it trigger under very special circumstances and as others have pointed out, the error you introduce could be a subtle change of behaviour of the random number generator.