If the locked gate is on a right of way you are perfectly entitled to bring some bolt cutters and remove the lock
But make sure you leave the lock hooked on the gate (or otherwise obviously associated with it) after opening it. After all, you don't want to be accused of theft. (Or, if there's a name and address on the lock, mail it to its owner saying that they must've "accidentally" left it somewhere and you're just returning it.)
They might not have been "designed to inhale particulates" but they are designed to deal with them.
Not especially. Smoke of all kinds is not good for you; we're not so much adapted to them as adapted to try to survive them as best we can. Second-hand smoke is particularly a problem because it is someone else's pollution, someone else's choice that is causing you harm. (Yes, first-hand smoke does more harm, but it's also usually something opted into.)
The source of the smoke is largely irrelevant to this particular argument though; most of the problem components of the smoke are pretty much the same from all sources (though some plastics are particularly nasty, especially the halogenated ones IIRC).
Is it illegal in the UK for a private company (without any government funds) to mix religion with its business? It is illegal in USA? If there is no public resources involved, there is no standing for others to sue them.
On the other hand, others do have the freedom of expression to disparage the idea and the company. Again not using public funds or resources.
If a private company provides a service that their customers can explicitly opt into which allows those customers to prevent their computer from visiting certain websites, then that is their right. It's the "explicit opt in" which is the important part; it makes whether or not the government is involved irrelevant. Nobody has the right to force anyone to go to any particular website (much to the enormous disgust of the whole marketing profession). Yes, I deplore the fact that some feel it necessary to try to shut out the world, but it is their decision. I hope that they'll try to avoid becoming over-insular, as that's always a danger with religious groupings, but I also think it's important to let them choose.
It's perhaps worth noting that the UK is far more relaxed about the whole Church/State business than the US, and that the established Church here is definitely not purely a force for conservatism (in contrast to many US churches). Mind you, the UK (like the rest of Europe) is a lot more secular than the US; there's very few ISPs who would choose to alienate the majority of their customers by imposing censorship at the behest of any religious group.
I like how Americans think they know what a 500 year event looks like. Sort of like asking a toddler what his future job is like.
They can use archaeological evidence to have a good guess, combined with power-law modeling. Other evidence that is useful is looking at the location of the edge of rivers' floodplains in the landscape, as you can bet if it's been there before then it will become keen on flowing there once again. (There are a few exceptions to that, but let's not worry too much about a repeat of the Missoula Floods any time soon.) For sure it's not going to be certain, but then it isn't likely to be anywhere else in the world either; nobody's records are perfect so we make do with what we've actually got.
You now have two objects of type Button. Next you get specific. okay.onClick(proceed()); cancel.onClick(abort());
This is terrible pseudocode butyou get the idea.
I'm glad you say that it's terrible, since you're registering the result of a function call with the button handler. While that might be what you intended, I somehow doubt it.
In general though, it's normal to deal with GUI objects through configuration and aggregation; subclassing to just set the color and add an "activated" callback is misuse. Instead, a subclass should add significant extra behavior, e.g., those buttons that also incorporate a menu dropdown to select variations on behavior. It's for those sorts of reasons that you use a subclass (assuming that the toolkit doesn't provide the widget already; if it does, writing your own is just dumb).
The advantage of the object oriented paradigm is not primarily that it makes programming easier or faster. It is the better support of separation between different components, which makes it possible to contain the complexity of large projects with multiple software engineers.
For all that, it is the componentization that is the source of the big gain. Having a reasonable degree of isolation and clearly defined interfaces makes things so much easier. OO is a somewhat fickle friend of this approach, especially when inheritance is used. Inheritance is a powerful and oft-misused tool. Some programmers, on finding a problem, think "I'll use inheritance to solve this!" After that, they don't have one problem, or two, but rather a whole family of needy child problems. (If only we could disable inheritance for all programmers who don't know what an "is-a" relationship actually is, we'd fix the problem with bad use of inheritance almost immediately. And there'd only be about 10 people worldwide who actually willingly used it in the first place.)
The trade-off over speed is not an issue at all; for example, C++ is not significantly slower than C.
I take it you're not including the time to compile in that?
More seriously, C++ most certainly has the potential to be slower than C, even without the problems of optimization. (C++ compilers optimize really rather well indeed; they damn well ought to, given how much compiler writing effort has been applied to them!) The real problem is that C++ programs tend to have more levels of indirection, and poorer data locality. That in turn hurts cache efficiency, which hits performance.
The other problem that plagues C++ code is a tendency to take ages for a process to shut down. That's caused mainly by the widespread use of the RAII style of coding (nonetheless a useful technique) and the way that on exit that leads to the C++ runtime wanting to neatly delete every single object. It's a theoretically laudable aim — after all, the object might need special action to release, even though that's rarely true for a majority of objects — but hurts rather a lot in a large program. It's particularly galling to know that the cost of getting everything that was paged out back into memory just to delete them is mainly wasted; the OS could reclaim far more efficiently by just reaping the process.
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. -- Wayne Gretzky
Yet everything I've ever heard about Ballmer indicates that he's the type to hold a management meeting to agree where the puck was and to work out what their strategic approach to dealing with the whole puck-goal situation needs to be in the first place. Time and again MS come up with good things internally with great potential, and time and again they kill them for obscure reasons. They'll even try to throw competing teams at the same problem, if I've remembered right.
It's no wonder that so many other companies run rings around them. If it wasn't for the behemoth of Office (including all the server components that support it, such as Exchange and Sharepoint) MS would be in amazingly deep trouble. As it is, they're sufficiently rich from that that they can tolerate a lot of management stupidity.
Unless you have rabies and are hydrophobic you'd love it here, frankly I could do with seeing sunlight (and no I don't live in a basement) Some rich buggers have cellars - it's not quite the same thing, We've just had our wettest june ever known, typical we were prohibitited by law from using hosepipies even to drain the floodwater away.
That's because you're insisting on living in the South East. The rest of the country has more than enough water by any measure. (Do you want to buy some drinking water? I'm sure we'd be happy to sell you a reservoir-load. Buyer collect.)
Yes, but you can use AC to pump it out easily enough, when the insulation will make it much easier for the AC unit to maintain a comfortable temperature.
Performance review outcomes purely on the basis of length of service? That's abysmal! Sure sounds like you had a very good reason for making them your former employer. What a bunch of total jerks.
Even their relatively recent success of the Xbox may not have yet turned a profit, given the billions they sank into getting it going.
It also depends on how they handle the accounting for it. Major products often generate multiple income streams (e.g., direct income from selling the Xbox units, licensing of developer tools, licensing of trademarks on game packaging, etc.) and if they're credited to different accounts internally, it can look like some parts aren't turning a profit even if overall a profit was made. What's more, a loss can be useful as a thing to offset against tax liabilities. Accounting is tricky and full of shenanigans! (Are MS doing every possible trick? Who knows; would take a very good accountant with full access to their books to work it out.)
Photon propagation is affected by gravity, though.
But the Higgs mechanism isn't there to explain gravity. It's there to explain why some particles have rest masses at all. AIUI, a large part of the mass of a proton or neutron is explained by the energy stored in the Strong Nuclear binding field that couples the component quarks, but the Higgs mechanism is there to explain the rest.
Actually, Laplace's idea does allow for emergence (you just need to know enough about the laws of physics and how they combine). Where it runs into problems is when faced with non-linearity (i.e., mathematical chaos and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions) and quantum physics (you can't ever know the initial state and there's no hidden variable theory that you can deduce by observation). In other words, Laplace was wrong but for excellent and interesting reasons.
On the bright side, some of the younger slashdotters may live long enough to see the return of shallow fresh water seas in eastern Colorado and Kansas. Of course travelling to some place where it rains 370 days a year would not be much of a vacation.
I'm in the UK. I know what that sort of rain feels like, intimately.
You miss the point. Yes, these are relatively trivial services, but that doesn't mean that cloud providers can'tor won't drop more important services. You maynot expect an online service to last more than 5 years, but most businesses do.
But you miss the point. If it is important to you that a service be there, you should be willing to pay for it (or support it in other ways). If you're willing to pay, you're going to find someone willing to take your money and provide the service. It might not be the original provider of the service, but nobody ever promised you that. What's more, you've got plenty of notice of the discontinuation of the service by the current provider, time enough to find a replacement. (If you have irreplaceable data in the service — shame on you if you do! — then it is a very good day to start backing that data up to something you control directly. But that was true a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago too.)
Expecting a service to "just be there" while costing nothing to you is unreasonable. It's even unreasonable on the internet (shock! horror!) and the Cloud is just a label for virtualized services provided over the internet.
I still don't see why it is as essential as, say, heating in Canada is in winter
I don't think anyone's saying that heating in winter in Canada isn't important! It's just that with temperatures at or over your body's core temperature, and with very high humidity so there's very little to no evaporative cooling, you have a tendency to overheat and very little opportunity to cool down. Getting too hot is lethal (just like getting too cold is). Thus AC (which both cools and dehumidifies) is important in some climates; the south-eastern part of the USA has that sort of climate. (The US south-west is mainly hotter but drier, so evaporative cooling is more effective.)
The NE neighborhoods are so old they predate power lines. Tearing up all the streets and sidewalks in the entire northeastern US would have cost ridiculous amounts of money.
But they've also got lots of people to pay for it. (Being in an old neighborhood isn't a reason to not bury. It's an excuse, and a poor one too.)
Want to see some little old ladies go into apoplectic shock? Just have a line crew show up with a bucket truck and pole saw and try to cut back some of the beautiful street trees the city has planted.
I don't know about the East Coast, but out here in Seattle, we have community organizations dedicated to the propagation of power line killing, pollen shedding, crapping bird perches.
So bury the power lines. Costs more to install, and lots more when you have to do maintenance (thankfully less often) but you have far less trouble with storms; the lines are definitely more protected than above ground. OTOH, backhoes, tree roots and burrowing animals will now acquire new significance to your daily lives...
Consequently the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to every shareholder to doing everything reasonable to maximize profits.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what fiduciary duty actually means. It doesn't mean that they have to let you sell things against the software authors' license, as the board could argue that they are encouraging a reduction in liabilities by refusing you, or that they are encouraging other parts of the business. Demonstrating otherwise (necessary for a lawsuit to be successful) would be ridiculously difficult. The board has considerable leeway to decide what fiduciary duty means under normal circumstances (the exceptions are when major transactions are in progress, such as the time close to an IPO or when the company is being wound up) and accepting a particular trade isn't going to register on their radar at all.
As I said, you don't appear to know what your are talking about.
C and C++ (I consider them essentially the same, if only because I write them essentially the same) have a few advantages:
But they're not the same, and the general practice of their use is very much not the same. C and C++ are diverging somewhat, and it's definitely the case that what is good practice in one is often bad practice in the other.
They both have their niches though. C's good for low-level work, embedded systems, operating systems, runtimes for other languages, basic libraries. For almost anything you might choose to do, some of it is likely to be founded on something written in C. C++ is mostly higher-level, and it stakes a claim to be able to cope with going quite a lot higher level than C. It mostly succeeds with that, but it's connection with the low-level world of C is both its strength (it can be very fast) and its weakness (it can be very unsafe). What's more, there have been a number of technical mistakes made during the language's development that have awful consequences down the line (e.g., the multi-rooted class hierarchy, access to operators without requiring mathematical structures).
Overall, the biggest problem of all are the people who insist that a single language be used for everything. Or "idiots" as I like to call them. Languages are abstractions, and abstractions both empower you and restrict you. Indeed, they empower by restricting; you're empowered by not having to think about everything, but in turn that means there are things you can't think about. Since you can't have one without the other, you have to trade-off carefully and bear in mind that sometimes the abstraction was wrongly selected and not be too proud about it.
Doing it with C++ is extremely easy - limit your public API to the subset of C++ that is identical to C (i.e. global functions & structs), and declare all exported functions as extern "C". Many other high-level languages have some similar arrangements.
But writers of C++ libraries don't do that in practice. They could, but they prefer to export their language features across library boundaries. To be fair, I would too in their position; it's much more useful within a C++ environment. The other key problem with C++ as a language for portable libraries is that it often depends on tweaked linking in the build-chain for some key features. Typically, when compiling and linking C++ these things are turned on automatically for the compiler/linker combination that you're using. However, they vary by build chain and if you're using the library from a non-C++ environment then you don't get them turned on and so get to find out rather more about what's going on under the covers than you really wanted to know.
It's easier to produce a highly-portable library with C than with C++, as the basic ABI is more stable and there are fewer compiler tricks going on. Being boring and predictable and stable is a real bonus...
For whoever asks "what's the right job for Brainfuck?"... just wait. Someone will eventually come along and get modded +2 Funny when they reply to you.
Brainfuck is the right tool for the job if the job is to be a simple a language for which one can create the world's smallest ELF capable compiler.
The main problem with Brainfuck as a language is the severe lack of system calls available, and has no foreign-function interface either (which could be used to integrate an assembler snippet that did system calls). Without the system calls, you can't be a practical language, and will always be stuck being a toy.
When you use an US-based company to trust your data too, you are a fool.
More to the point, they don't have any non-US zones, nor do they mention any plans at all to change this. OK, such a rollout is not trivial since it can't just be done by freeing up server space; they probably have to alter their corporate structure as well so as to limit the amount to which the non-US operations arms can be pressured by the US government via the parent. If you've got a legal requirement to keep your data out of the US, GCE is not for you. Amazon have had this addressed for years.
Slashdot Mirror
If the locked gate is on a right of way you are perfectly entitled to bring some bolt cutters and remove the lock
But make sure you leave the lock hooked on the gate (or otherwise obviously associated with it) after opening it. After all, you don't want to be accused of theft. (Or, if there's a name and address on the lock, mail it to its owner saying that they must've "accidentally" left it somewhere and you're just returning it.)
Whats left for 300 million people to do?
Investment banking.
They might not have been "designed to inhale particulates" but they are designed to deal with them.
Not especially. Smoke of all kinds is not good for you; we're not so much adapted to them as adapted to try to survive them as best we can. Second-hand smoke is particularly a problem because it is someone else's pollution, someone else's choice that is causing you harm. (Yes, first-hand smoke does more harm, but it's also usually something opted into.)
The source of the smoke is largely irrelevant to this particular argument though; most of the problem components of the smoke are pretty much the same from all sources (though some plastics are particularly nasty, especially the halogenated ones IIRC).
Is it illegal in the UK for a private company (without any government funds) to mix religion with its business? It is illegal in USA? If there is no public resources involved, there is no standing for others to sue them.
On the other hand, others do have the freedom of expression to disparage the idea and the company. Again not using public funds or resources.
If a private company provides a service that their customers can explicitly opt into which allows those customers to prevent their computer from visiting certain websites, then that is their right. It's the "explicit opt in" which is the important part; it makes whether or not the government is involved irrelevant. Nobody has the right to force anyone to go to any particular website (much to the enormous disgust of the whole marketing profession). Yes, I deplore the fact that some feel it necessary to try to shut out the world, but it is their decision. I hope that they'll try to avoid becoming over-insular, as that's always a danger with religious groupings, but I also think it's important to let them choose.
It's perhaps worth noting that the UK is far more relaxed about the whole Church/State business than the US, and that the established Church here is definitely not purely a force for conservatism (in contrast to many US churches). Mind you, the UK (like the rest of Europe) is a lot more secular than the US; there's very few ISPs who would choose to alienate the majority of their customers by imposing censorship at the behest of any religious group.
I like how Americans think they know what a 500 year event looks like. Sort of like asking a toddler what his future job is like.
They can use archaeological evidence to have a good guess, combined with power-law modeling. Other evidence that is useful is looking at the location of the edge of rivers' floodplains in the landscape, as you can bet if it's been there before then it will become keen on flowing there once again. (There are a few exceptions to that, but let's not worry too much about a repeat of the Missoula Floods any time soon.) For sure it's not going to be certain, but then it isn't likely to be anywhere else in the world either; nobody's records are perfect so we make do with what we've actually got.
You now have two objects of type Button. Next you get specific.
okay.onClick(proceed());
cancel.onClick(abort());
This is terrible pseudocode butyou get the idea.
I'm glad you say that it's terrible, since you're registering the result of a function call with the button handler. While that might be what you intended, I somehow doubt it.
In general though, it's normal to deal with GUI objects through configuration and aggregation; subclassing to just set the color and add an "activated" callback is misuse. Instead, a subclass should add significant extra behavior, e.g., those buttons that also incorporate a menu dropdown to select variations on behavior. It's for those sorts of reasons that you use a subclass (assuming that the toolkit doesn't provide the widget already; if it does, writing your own is just dumb).
The advantage of the object oriented paradigm is not primarily that it makes programming easier or faster. It is the better support of separation between different components, which makes it possible to contain the complexity of large projects with multiple software engineers.
For all that, it is the componentization that is the source of the big gain. Having a reasonable degree of isolation and clearly defined interfaces makes things so much easier. OO is a somewhat fickle friend of this approach, especially when inheritance is used. Inheritance is a powerful and oft-misused tool. Some programmers, on finding a problem, think "I'll use inheritance to solve this!" After that, they don't have one problem, or two, but rather a whole family of needy child problems. (If only we could disable inheritance for all programmers who don't know what an "is-a" relationship actually is, we'd fix the problem with bad use of inheritance almost immediately. And there'd only be about 10 people worldwide who actually willingly used it in the first place.)
The trade-off over speed is not an issue at all; for example, C++ is not significantly slower than C.
I take it you're not including the time to compile in that?
More seriously, C++ most certainly has the potential to be slower than C, even without the problems of optimization. (C++ compilers optimize really rather well indeed; they damn well ought to, given how much compiler writing effort has been applied to them!) The real problem is that C++ programs tend to have more levels of indirection, and poorer data locality. That in turn hurts cache efficiency, which hits performance.
The other problem that plagues C++ code is a tendency to take ages for a process to shut down. That's caused mainly by the widespread use of the RAII style of coding (nonetheless a useful technique) and the way that on exit that leads to the C++ runtime wanting to neatly delete every single object. It's a theoretically laudable aim — after all, the object might need special action to release, even though that's rarely true for a majority of objects — but hurts rather a lot in a large program. It's particularly galling to know that the cost of getting everything that was paged out back into memory just to delete them is mainly wasted; the OS could reclaim far more efficiently by just reaping the process.
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
-- Wayne Gretzky
Yet everything I've ever heard about Ballmer indicates that he's the type to hold a management meeting to agree where the puck was and to work out what their strategic approach to dealing with the whole puck-goal situation needs to be in the first place. Time and again MS come up with good things internally with great potential, and time and again they kill them for obscure reasons. They'll even try to throw competing teams at the same problem, if I've remembered right.
It's no wonder that so many other companies run rings around them. If it wasn't for the behemoth of Office (including all the server components that support it, such as Exchange and Sharepoint) MS would be in amazingly deep trouble. As it is, they're sufficiently rich from that that they can tolerate a lot of management stupidity.
Unless you have rabies and are hydrophobic you'd love it here, frankly I could do with seeing sunlight (and no I don't live in a basement) Some rich buggers have cellars - it's not quite the same thing, We've just had our wettest june ever known, typical we were prohibitited by law from using hosepipies even to drain the floodwater away.
That's because you're insisting on living in the South East. The rest of the country has more than enough water by any measure. (Do you want to buy some drinking water? I'm sure we'd be happy to sell you a reservoir-load. Buyer collect.)
Wouldn't insulation keep heat in once it got in?
Yes, but you can use AC to pump it out easily enough, when the insulation will make it much easier for the AC unit to maintain a comfortable temperature.
Performance review outcomes purely on the basis of length of service? That's abysmal! Sure sounds like you had a very good reason for making them your former employer. What a bunch of total jerks.
Even their relatively recent success of the Xbox may not have yet turned a profit, given the billions they sank into getting it going.
It also depends on how they handle the accounting for it. Major products often generate multiple income streams (e.g., direct income from selling the Xbox units, licensing of developer tools, licensing of trademarks on game packaging, etc.) and if they're credited to different accounts internally, it can look like some parts aren't turning a profit even if overall a profit was made. What's more, a loss can be useful as a thing to offset against tax liabilities. Accounting is tricky and full of shenanigans! (Are MS doing every possible trick? Who knows; would take a very good accountant with full access to their books to work it out.)
Photon propagation is affected by gravity, though.
But the Higgs mechanism isn't there to explain gravity. It's there to explain why some particles have rest masses at all. AIUI, a large part of the mass of a proton or neutron is explained by the energy stored in the Strong Nuclear binding field that couples the component quarks, but the Higgs mechanism is there to explain the rest.
well he was wrong, this kind of idea doesnt allow for emergance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Actually, Laplace's idea does allow for emergence (you just need to know enough about the laws of physics and how they combine). Where it runs into problems is when faced with non-linearity (i.e., mathematical chaos and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions) and quantum physics (you can't ever know the initial state and there's no hidden variable theory that you can deduce by observation). In other words, Laplace was wrong but for excellent and interesting reasons.
On the bright side, some of the younger slashdotters may live long enough to see the return of shallow fresh water seas in eastern Colorado and Kansas. Of course travelling to some place where it rains 370 days a year would not be much of a vacation.
I'm in the UK. I know what that sort of rain feels like, intimately.
You miss the point. Yes, these are relatively trivial services, but that doesn't mean that cloud providers can'tor won't drop more important services. You maynot expect an online service to last more than 5 years, but most businesses do.
But you miss the point. If it is important to you that a service be there, you should be willing to pay for it (or support it in other ways). If you're willing to pay, you're going to find someone willing to take your money and provide the service. It might not be the original provider of the service, but nobody ever promised you that. What's more, you've got plenty of notice of the discontinuation of the service by the current provider, time enough to find a replacement. (If you have irreplaceable data in the service — shame on you if you do! — then it is a very good day to start backing that data up to something you control directly. But that was true a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago too.)
Expecting a service to "just be there" while costing nothing to you is unreasonable. It's even unreasonable on the internet (shock! horror!) and the Cloud is just a label for virtualized services provided over the internet.
I still don't see why it is as essential as, say, heating in Canada is in winter
I don't think anyone's saying that heating in winter in Canada isn't important! It's just that with temperatures at or over your body's core temperature, and with very high humidity so there's very little to no evaporative cooling, you have a tendency to overheat and very little opportunity to cool down. Getting too hot is lethal (just like getting too cold is). Thus AC (which both cools and dehumidifies) is important in some climates; the south-eastern part of the USA has that sort of climate. (The US south-west is mainly hotter but drier, so evaporative cooling is more effective.)
The NE neighborhoods are so old they predate power lines. Tearing up all the streets and sidewalks in the entire northeastern US would have cost ridiculous amounts of money.
But they've also got lots of people to pay for it. (Being in an old neighborhood isn't a reason to not bury. It's an excuse, and a poor one too.)
Want to see some little old ladies go into apoplectic shock? Just have a line crew show up with a bucket truck and pole saw and try to cut back some of the beautiful street trees the city has planted.
I don't know about the East Coast, but out here in Seattle, we have community organizations dedicated to the propagation of power line killing, pollen shedding, crapping bird perches.
So bury the power lines. Costs more to install, and lots more when you have to do maintenance (thankfully less often) but you have far less trouble with storms; the lines are definitely more protected than above ground. OTOH, backhoes, tree roots and burrowing animals will now acquire new significance to your daily lives...
Consequently the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to every shareholder to doing everything reasonable to maximize profits.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know what fiduciary duty actually means. It doesn't mean that they have to let you sell things against the software authors' license, as the board could argue that they are encouraging a reduction in liabilities by refusing you, or that they are encouraging other parts of the business. Demonstrating otherwise (necessary for a lawsuit to be successful) would be ridiculously difficult. The board has considerable leeway to decide what fiduciary duty means under normal circumstances (the exceptions are when major transactions are in progress, such as the time close to an IPO or when the company is being wound up) and accepting a particular trade isn't going to register on their radar at all.
As I said, you don't appear to know what your are talking about.
Why are Americans so obsessed with air conditioning?
Because their summer climate is crap. When you've got temperatures around 100F and humidity over 90%, you become very keen on air conditioning.
C and C++ (I consider them essentially the same, if only because I write them essentially the same) have a few advantages:
But they're not the same, and the general practice of their use is very much not the same. C and C++ are diverging somewhat, and it's definitely the case that what is good practice in one is often bad practice in the other.
They both have their niches though. C's good for low-level work, embedded systems, operating systems, runtimes for other languages, basic libraries. For almost anything you might choose to do, some of it is likely to be founded on something written in C. C++ is mostly higher-level, and it stakes a claim to be able to cope with going quite a lot higher level than C. It mostly succeeds with that, but it's connection with the low-level world of C is both its strength (it can be very fast) and its weakness (it can be very unsafe). What's more, there have been a number of technical mistakes made during the language's development that have awful consequences down the line (e.g., the multi-rooted class hierarchy, access to operators without requiring mathematical structures).
Overall, the biggest problem of all are the people who insist that a single language be used for everything. Or "idiots" as I like to call them. Languages are abstractions, and abstractions both empower you and restrict you. Indeed, they empower by restricting; you're empowered by not having to think about everything, but in turn that means there are things you can't think about. Since you can't have one without the other, you have to trade-off carefully and bear in mind that sometimes the abstraction was wrongly selected and not be too proud about it.
Doing it with C++ is extremely easy - limit your public API to the subset of C++ that is identical to C (i.e. global functions & structs), and declare all exported functions as extern "C". Many other high-level languages have some similar arrangements.
But writers of C++ libraries don't do that in practice. They could, but they prefer to export their language features across library boundaries. To be fair, I would too in their position; it's much more useful within a C++ environment. The other key problem with C++ as a language for portable libraries is that it often depends on tweaked linking in the build-chain for some key features. Typically, when compiling and linking C++ these things are turned on automatically for the compiler/linker combination that you're using. However, they vary by build chain and if you're using the library from a non-C++ environment then you don't get them turned on and so get to find out rather more about what's going on under the covers than you really wanted to know.
It's easier to produce a highly-portable library with C than with C++, as the basic ABI is more stable and there are fewer compiler tricks going on. Being boring and predictable and stable is a real bonus...
For whoever asks "what's the right job for Brainfuck?" ... just wait. Someone will eventually come along and get modded +2 Funny when they reply to you.
Brainfuck is the right tool for the job if the job is to be a simple a language for which one can create the world's smallest ELF capable compiler.
The main problem with Brainfuck as a language is the severe lack of system calls available, and has no foreign-function interface either (which could be used to integrate an assembler snippet that did system calls). Without the system calls, you can't be a practical language, and will always be stuck being a toy.
When you use an US-based company to trust your data too, you are a fool.
More to the point, they don't have any non-US zones, nor do they mention any plans at all to change this. OK, such a rollout is not trivial since it can't just be done by freeing up server space; they probably have to alter their corporate structure as well so as to limit the amount to which the non-US operations arms can be pressured by the US government via the parent. If you've got a legal requirement to keep your data out of the US, GCE is not for you. Amazon have had this addressed for years.