As a commercial software developer who works very hard and doesn't want to see my work made available for free, why would I approve of what TPB are doing?
Perhaps you can try understanding another point of view first. I also working in software development, however, there is no way TPB can make work "available for free" (not mention TPB did not make anything available, they just point you to someone who did). Why? Because my work is in consulting and my selling point in my expertise.
If I consult for a company and improve their software by 100%, do you think I should be paid every time that company use and that software (and thus benefit from my "work")? No, because I already got paid once when I did the improvement.
Almost every other profession (lawyers, doctors, plumbers, etc) get paid only once for each time they put in effort. Could you imagine what kind of world we would be in if doctors patents every new surgery technique and charge other doctors for performing the same surgery? And worst, in this analogy, TPB is not even the doctor who copied the surgery, but a third party who told a doctor where he can see that surgery performed.
Count me in also. I was seriously looking into buying a Kindle, but if my ability to read books I have paid for is going to subjected to Amazon's continued goodwill, count me out.
This is insightful?! Do you also worry about meteor directly hitting and killing you too? It has more chance of happening than a micro meteor hitting, but not destroying, the satellite and then having just the right momentum to turn it by just the right amount to point at SF, and then the satellite somehow mysterious stop turning to keep pointing at SF to cause havoc.
After all, for the meteor to kill you it does not need to have an exact amount of momentum, it just need to hit you.
I will hold off buying any of their games until I see the DLC available for PS3 first.
Also, as with the "strategy guides" approach of the past, DLC will most likely be used to make you pay multiple times to get the whole game, it becomes simple due diligence to make sure DLC (a.k.a. missing parts of the game) will really be available for your platform before you buy.
Following/. tradition, I have not looked at the details, but that won't stop me from commenting here...:)
As someone who has been writing Java since '99, I have to say if even Threads is not supported, it is a big issue.
There is a reason why the Core class are called "Core", every Java library expects the Core classes are there. If we now have a popular Java platform that only have a subset of the Core classes, it will cause a lot of headaches down the road, eventually fragmenting the "Java" platform.
Maybe TorrentSpy should sue them for unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted materials, have FBI raid MPAA offices/computers to fish for evidence and ask for bazillion dollars damages in court.
The high-level design is flawed in their eyes, but they never bothered to tell anybody when they were asked.
I have been on both side of the fence, and I can tell you why, sometimes, I did the same.
One reason is that sometimes, the person that did the high-level design (e.g. architect or technical lead) gets very defensive and angry when their design was criticized or questioned, especially when there are fatal flaws in the design. After some unfortunate soul got shouted down once or twice and the design unchanged, you learned that raising questions is useless and just made you some enemies.
On the other side, I learned that to ask people to review or raise questions about your design, you have to first build up enough trust between you and other teammates, so that they know you really want their input and will really change the design if there is concern about it. You can do that by asking about some inconsequential stuff first, like the placement of files, etc, and show them you really use their input.
Without such trust in place, asking for input from someone lower in hierarchy (i.e. the coders or the "grunts") will often not get you any response.
Things have pretty much changed over the last 30 odd years if people genuinely believe a 1 in 6 failure rate is acceptable.
The same company that made people think rebooting a few times a day is normal.
Re:If you don't plead, DOJ only has a 30% rate
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 1
if you don't plead guilty, there is a 70% chance you will get off.
You forgot to account for the consequence if you don't plead guilty but loss in the end.
If you faced with a possibility of 20 years in jail if you plead innocent but lose, vs only 1 year if you plead guilty, it is a reasonable choice to plead guilty even if you are really innocent. With a big enough difference (how about a 1 month if you plead guilty vs possibly 20 years if you fight), many people will cave in and move on with live, instead of fighting out of principle which may take years out of your life even if you emerge victorious.
IMO, the legality of making a "deal" with prosecution instead of requiring a judge to pass a sentence is a major source of injustice in the US. It encourages prosecution to scare the suspect to make a deal, instead of really finding out the guilty party. And if the prosecution losses, at worst he loses his job. The sheer difference in consequence for both sides make it impossible for any such "deal" to be fair or just.
If the driver behind you cannot see you are slowing down (with brake lights coming on) and stopping, and slammed into you instead, he has no business driving a car.
The idea that because someone is tailgating you so you cannot slow down is stupid. I always slow down when someone tailgates me (slowly! just pull up your feet from the gas pedal and let the car coast, press very lightly on the brake to light up the brake lights at the back), both to give more reaction time for both of us in case the car in front stops, and to agitate him so he will switch lanes and pass me ASAP.
One should also take note that both this "Just suck it up" mentality and the pervasive idea that "sports" means powerful concussion is only pervasive in America.
Just take a look at the Olympics, how many of the sports there are done wearing full body armor?
To most of the rest of the world, "sports" consists of athletic activities to often have little body contact. Even those that have body contact, one is not expected to crash head-on with the opponent.
I am sorry, but listing out all possibilities (assuming that's what they did) and showing one is the minimum IS a valid proof for that minimum in that particular case.
For example, to prove "7 is a prime number", listing out 1,2,3,4,5,6 and then showing all are not a factor of 7 is a valid proof that "7 is a prime number". If you think this is not a proof, tell me which step in the proof is wrong.
Of course, whether the proof of Distributed.net is correct depends on how strongly they can prove their program actually covered all possibilities.
I got tired of console games that were buggy/poorly tested etc. and could NOT be patched. I was stuck with the first release version.
No longer.
I was surprised and a bit annoyed when GT5 Prologue wants to download a patch the first time it was run after I bought a PS3 with it. After it finishes, checking out the news section turned out that the patch includes some fixes and new features just like a PC game!
Same for getting system updates for the PS3 itself.
While it is good so far, I worry PS3 game developers might pickup the bad habits of PC game developers and release games half-tested and expect to patch them afterward.
Depending on the local laws, the age/size of the kid getting spanked, the kid's temperament, and who noticed the spanking, you may get the following outcomes with unknown probability:
1. The kid become responsible
2. The kid rebels and drive recklessly just to spite you
3. The kid fought back and spanked you instead
4. You are charged with child abuse and your kid is taken away from you
80 mph might sound a lot for a responsible driver. But I have known a friend who has "tested" his new car by accelerating to 200 mph for a short stretch.
You got realize that many modern cars are capable of speeds that should have no real world use. If your kid decides to show off or race his car, he will be going much faster than 80 mph.
I think setting the limit at 80 mph is precisely because that kind of speed should have no real world use. Yet to show off, you need much higher speed than that, so the limit effectively made the car "normal use only". And I think that's precisely the point.
Giving them a "restricted" car is precisely because they are going to push against it. Guess what? Because giving them an unrestricted car will not cause them to behave!
Yes, teenagers are not trusted, is that even news to teenagers? If your teenage kid still haven't realized it yet, then he better learn it quick, because that's how the real world works -- most sensible people will not trust you until you have shown yourself to be trustworthy, particularly for teenagers precisely because most of them cannot be trusted, that's what the "grow up" part is about.
I don't know what kind of approach you are plannign to teach a kid/teenager to become "responsible driver", but I know in practice it won't happen overnight. So in the meanwhile, before that teenager learned to responsible, you have 2 options - (1) let him drive and hope he won't do something stupid with it, or (2) don't let him drive out of your sight. What this technology tries to do is to give you a third option - (3) let him drive an restricted car which wouldn't restrict him at all if he is driving responsibly. If that teenager insist on thinking option 3 means his is not "trusted", he needs a reality check (see 2nd paragraph above) and that thinking precisely demonstrates he has yet to grow up.
It is the same as having kids wear a floating suit when he is learning to swim, or even after he learned to swim. It is not to say he is "not trusted", it is there to prevent accidents so he can live long enough to grow up. Some kids' parent don't bother with that, their kids still grow up and they think nothing of it. Some other parents also don't bother and their kids drowned.
Some teenagers drive wrecklessly and still managed to stay alive til they grow up. Some teenagers drive wrecklessly and died/injured in accidents. Some teenagers don't get to drive all and grow up to buy their own car. Some teenagers don't get to drive all and still die in accidents. Your choice.
This 20-minute spacewalk must have been practiced hundreds of times on the ground already, do you think that everyone involved would not already know exactly who would say what at exactly when?! Especially if everything went according to plan?
The only glitch in the whole process was some problem opening the door. If the reported dialog does not contain that part, anyone who have ever seen one of their practices could have written a report with dialog before the rocket left the ground.
Sometimes I wonder about this China blindside I see in Slashdot, is it a language problem? The whole spacewalk is broadcasted live, and you can hear the dialogs (and if you understand chinese) were mostly the kind like "astronaut 1, please report status", "astronaut 1 report, all is fine", etc. The speech the astronaut delivered after getting out (basically greeting China and the world) and the flag waving is so obviously scripted, that all reporter with inside contact must have had it days ago.
So let's see. About $0.50 or less for a single layer DVD, maybe add the cost of a label, is about $7 profit. At what, $1.50 for a dual-layer DVD is maybe $18 profit. For copied games.
You got the economics wrong, on both the price setting mechanism and the pirate's cost. Not to say that pirating is right, just stating the facts here.
Simply put, the price is determined by how much the buyer is willing to pay and what other options the buyer has. Since legit XBox360 games costs more than PS2 and Wii games, XB360 buyers will usually be willing to pay more (it didn't bother them that legit XB360 games costs more, so why should they care pirated XB360 games cost more?). Your buddy is good example.
On the cost side, for the pirate the main cost is not the physical disk, but the dubbing equipment and the time it takes to burn the disk. For DL disk, both the time cost and the equipment cost are higher, and thus he will charge you more. Simply assuming DL took twice as long to burn as SL, plus the additional cost of the DL burner can explain a lot of the cost difference.
Accountants and Lawyers have professional bodies (or whatever it is called) that tests candidates wanting to call themselves "accountant" and "lawyer", so do doctors, nurses, engineers, etc, so employers don't need to test the candidates themselves when they want to hire one. if people call themselves "lawyer" or "accountant" without the proper certification, they could be jailed.
Which is the corresponding organization that tested and certified you as an "IT professional"? Can your employer file complaints to that organization and have your certification removed if you displayed incompetence or is negligent in your job? And would anyone risk jail time if they call themselves "IT Professional" without any such certification?
Don't kid yourself, an IT worker is hardly any more "professional" than a secretary or a salesman. Anyone sitting in front of a monitor for the past 10 years can call himself an "IT Professional" with 10 years of experience. Heck, someone who had NOT been sitting in front of a monitor for the past 10 years can also do so! Until we have a widely recognized professional body to certify us (and to de-certify or penalize us if we display incompetence), it is the employers' responsibility to assess our capability and testing us is one way to do it.
I am sure many working in the field would prefer their employers had properly tested themselves and their co-workers, rather than having to fix up problems caused by other less-than-competent "IT Professionals".
If your purpose is to scientifically track and deal with real diseases, reporting from the lab is useful.
If your purpose is to dig up scare stories as headlines to sell newspapers/websites/etc, the which ever way digs up more scare stories (regardless of being true or not) is useful.
"News" have long ago lost any purpose of informing, assume it ever has that in the beginning. Nowadays, "news" is just baits used to catch your attention to advertisers, who are the real customer of any "news" organization, be it newspaper, TV or web site.
Which headline do you think catches more attention (thus earn more profit)? "Some guy lost his Blackberry?" or "Chinese spys strikes again"?
I am quite surprised there will be people replying yet still don't get it even with the hints provided.
It has been years since I worked deeply with C++, but off the top of my head, I can still remember these possible differences.
First, for the simpler cases, when "a" is of the simple types, such as "int", and assume a=10 initially:
1. If f() is declared as f(int& a) - i.e. takes a reference, then might have changed value of a, e.g. set it 20. Then with "f(a); a++;" you get a=21 afterwards. With "f(a++)", a remains 11 since, surprise, a reference to a temporary instance of int of with the old value of a is passed to f().
Second, if "a" is of a class type, e.g. of class "A", it gets even more fun
2. If f() is declared as f(A& a), taking a reference, the usually caveat about modifying a reference to a temporary copy still applies, but now it also depends on how the ++ operator is defined for class A. You know, A::++() could have returned the reference to the same instance afterall, such as if the ++() operator is not about changing value but performing some action. Stupid? As stupid as using the bitshift operator for reading/writing from a stream. Don't underestimate the creativity of your fellow programmers.
3. At the very least, the execution order of the ++ operator and the f() is reversed.
4. Have more fun considering the possibility of global variables modified in f() and the A::++() operator! Remember, the order of execution is different in the 2 cases.
5. If f() is declared as f(A a), have extra fun now you add in the copy operator to the mix for the temporary copy created when f() is invoked! Think again of the different execution order for the 2 calls. Hint: in one case ++() is called first, in the other it is called last.
6. If the above are not enough, consider the possibility that there is no matching function f(A), BUT there is one f(B) where the typecast operator from A->B exists. Have even more fun considering the possible execution order, global variable dependency, etc.
7. Add in the fun with polymorphism with virtual ++ operator, virtual typecast operator, etc.
8. Have extra bonus fun with considering what happens if f() or ++() throws exception (Thanks AC for this, I haven't even considered exception until you mentioned it)
Bottom line is unless you know exactly how f() is defined and exactly how type A is defined, you cannot be sure if it will safe to replace "f(a++)" with "f(a); a++;". Won't that be great if either f() or A comes from a third party library?
When you can't even be sure with basic operations like function call and post-increment operator, it is beyond reasonable to expect a normal average programmer NOT to hit some gotchas in a normal program.
BTW, you Java example is wrong too. It should be replacing "f(foo(a))" with "A a = foo(a); f(a);". And guess what, no matter how f() and foo() is defined, as long as A is the return type of foo(), you can be sure the two forms will give the same results, even in the case of exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
As a commercial software developer who works very hard and doesn't want to see my work made available for free, why would I approve of what TPB are doing?
Perhaps you can try understanding another point of view first. I also working in software development, however, there is no way TPB can make work "available for free" (not mention TPB did not make anything available, they just point you to someone who did). Why? Because my work is in consulting and my selling point in my expertise.
If I consult for a company and improve their software by 100%, do you think I should be paid every time that company use and that software (and thus benefit from my "work")? No, because I already got paid once when I did the improvement.
Almost every other profession (lawyers, doctors, plumbers, etc) get paid only once for each time they put in effort. Could you imagine what kind of world we would be in if doctors patents every new surgery technique and charge other doctors for performing the same surgery? And worst, in this analogy, TPB is not even the doctor who copied the surgery, but a third party who told a doctor where he can see that surgery performed.
Count me in also. I was seriously looking into buying a Kindle, but if my ability to read books I have paid for is going to subjected to Amazon's continued goodwill, count me out.
This is insightful?! Do you also worry about meteor directly hitting and killing you too? It has more chance of happening than a micro meteor hitting, but not destroying, the satellite and then having just the right momentum to turn it by just the right amount to point at SF, and then the satellite somehow mysterious stop turning to keep pointing at SF to cause havoc.
After all, for the meteor to kill you it does not need to have an exact amount of momentum, it just need to hit you.
I will hold off buying any of their games until I see the DLC available for PS3 first.
Also, as with the "strategy guides" approach of the past, DLC will most likely be used to make you pay multiple times to get the whole game, it becomes simple due diligence to make sure DLC (a.k.a. missing parts of the game) will really be available for your platform before you buy.
Following /. tradition, I have not looked at the details, but that won't stop me from commenting here... :)
As someone who has been writing Java since '99, I have to say if even Threads is not supported, it is a big issue.
There is a reason why the Core class are called "Core", every Java library expects the Core classes are there. If we now have a popular Java platform that only have a subset of the Core classes, it will cause a lot of headaches down the road, eventually fragmenting the "Java" platform.
Maybe TorrentSpy should sue them for unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted materials, have FBI raid MPAA offices/computers to fish for evidence and ask for bazillion dollars damages in court.
The high-level design is flawed in their eyes, but they never bothered to tell anybody when they were asked.
I have been on both side of the fence, and I can tell you why, sometimes, I did the same.
One reason is that sometimes, the person that did the high-level design (e.g. architect or technical lead) gets very defensive and angry when their design was criticized or questioned, especially when there are fatal flaws in the design. After some unfortunate soul got shouted down once or twice and the design unchanged, you learned that raising questions is useless and just made you some enemies.
On the other side, I learned that to ask people to review or raise questions about your design, you have to first build up enough trust between you and other teammates, so that they know you really want their input and will really change the design if there is concern about it. You can do that by asking about some inconsequential stuff first, like the placement of files, etc, and show them you really use their input.
Without such trust in place, asking for input from someone lower in hierarchy (i.e. the coders or the "grunts") will often not get you any response.
Things have pretty much changed over the last 30 odd years if people genuinely believe a 1 in 6 failure rate is acceptable.
The same company that made people think rebooting a few times a day is normal.
if you don't plead guilty, there is a 70% chance you will get off.
You forgot to account for the consequence if you don't plead guilty but loss in the end.
If you faced with a possibility of 20 years in jail if you plead innocent but lose, vs only 1 year if you plead guilty, it is a reasonable choice to plead guilty even if you are really innocent. With a big enough difference (how about a 1 month if you plead guilty vs possibly 20 years if you fight), many people will cave in and move on with live, instead of fighting out of principle which may take years out of your life even if you emerge victorious.
IMO, the legality of making a "deal" with prosecution instead of requiring a judge to pass a sentence is a major source of injustice in the US. It encourages prosecution to scare the suspect to make a deal, instead of really finding out the guilty party. And if the prosecution losses, at worst he loses his job. The sheer difference in consequence for both sides make it impossible for any such "deal" to be fair or just.
If the driver behind you cannot see you are slowing down (with brake lights coming on) and stopping, and slammed into you instead, he has no business driving a car.
The idea that because someone is tailgating you so you cannot slow down is stupid. I always slow down when someone tailgates me (slowly! just pull up your feet from the gas pedal and let the car coast, press very lightly on the brake to light up the brake lights at the back), both to give more reaction time for both of us in case the car in front stops, and to agitate him so he will switch lanes and pass me ASAP.
One should also take note that both this "Just suck it up" mentality and the pervasive idea that "sports" means powerful concussion is only pervasive in America.
Just take a look at the Olympics, how many of the sports there are done wearing full body armor?
To most of the rest of the world, "sports" consists of athletic activities to often have little body contact. Even those that have body contact, one is not expected to crash head-on with the opponent.
You mean like how Microsoft keeps innovating instead of copying others to ... er... never mind.
Heh, I had a good laugh out of this stupidity myself...
I am sorry, but listing out all possibilities (assuming that's what they did) and showing one is the minimum IS a valid proof for that minimum in that particular case.
For example, to prove "7 is a prime number", listing out 1,2,3,4,5,6 and then showing all are not a factor of 7 is a valid proof that "7 is a prime number". If you think this is not a proof, tell me which step in the proof is wrong.
Of course, whether the proof of Distributed.net is correct depends on how strongly they can prove their program actually covered all possibilities.
I got tired of console games that were buggy/poorly tested etc. and could NOT be patched. I was stuck with the first release version.
No longer.
I was surprised and a bit annoyed when GT5 Prologue wants to download a patch the first time it was run after I bought a PS3 with it. After it finishes, checking out the news section turned out that the patch includes some fixes and new features just like a PC game!
Same for getting system updates for the PS3 itself.
While it is good so far, I worry PS3 game developers might pickup the bad habits of PC game developers and release games half-tested and expect to patch them afterward.
Depending on the local laws, the age/size of the kid getting spanked, the kid's temperament, and who noticed the spanking, you may get the following outcomes with unknown probability:
1. The kid become responsible
2. The kid rebels and drive recklessly just to spite you
3. The kid fought back and spanked you instead
4. You are charged with child abuse and your kid is taken away from you
80 mph might sound a lot for a responsible driver. But I have known a friend who has "tested" his new car by accelerating to 200 mph for a short stretch.
You got realize that many modern cars are capable of speeds that should have no real world use. If your kid decides to show off or race his car, he will be going much faster than 80 mph.
I think setting the limit at 80 mph is precisely because that kind of speed should have no real world use. Yet to show off, you need much higher speed than that, so the limit effectively made the car "normal use only". And I think that's precisely the point.
Seriously, traditional societies recognize adulthood at, like 13. That's when you're physically mature.
Unless the law is aligned the same way, it means nothing.
Giving them a "restricted" car is precisely because they are going to push against it. Guess what? Because giving them an unrestricted car will not cause them to behave!
Yes, teenagers are not trusted, is that even news to teenagers? If your teenage kid still haven't realized it yet, then he better learn it quick, because that's how the real world works -- most sensible people will not trust you until you have shown yourself to be trustworthy, particularly for teenagers precisely because most of them cannot be trusted, that's what the "grow up" part is about.
I don't know what kind of approach you are plannign to teach a kid/teenager to become "responsible driver", but I know in practice it won't happen overnight. So in the meanwhile, before that teenager learned to responsible, you have 2 options - (1) let him drive and hope he won't do something stupid with it, or (2) don't let him drive out of your sight. What this technology tries to do is to give you a third option - (3) let him drive an restricted car which wouldn't restrict him at all if he is driving responsibly. If that teenager insist on thinking option 3 means his is not "trusted", he needs a reality check (see 2nd paragraph above) and that thinking precisely demonstrates he has yet to grow up.
It is the same as having kids wear a floating suit when he is learning to swim, or even after he learned to swim. It is not to say he is "not trusted", it is there to prevent accidents so he can live long enough to grow up. Some kids' parent don't bother with that, their kids still grow up and they think nothing of it. Some other parents also don't bother and their kids drowned.
Some teenagers drive wrecklessly and still managed to stay alive til they grow up. Some teenagers drive wrecklessly and died/injured in accidents. Some teenagers don't get to drive all and grow up to buy their own car. Some teenagers don't get to drive all and still die in accidents. Your choice.
Of course the dialog would be the same!
This 20-minute spacewalk must have been practiced hundreds of times on the ground already, do you think that everyone involved would not already know exactly who would say what at exactly when?! Especially if everything went according to plan?
The only glitch in the whole process was some problem opening the door. If the reported dialog does not contain that part, anyone who have ever seen one of their practices could have written a report with dialog before the rocket left the ground.
Sometimes I wonder about this China blindside I see in Slashdot, is it a language problem? The whole spacewalk is broadcasted live, and you can hear the dialogs (and if you understand chinese) were mostly the kind like "astronaut 1, please report status", "astronaut 1 report, all is fine", etc. The speech the astronaut delivered after getting out (basically greeting China and the world) and the flag waving is so obviously scripted, that all reporter with inside contact must have had it days ago.
So let's see. About $0.50 or less for a single layer DVD, maybe add the cost of a label, is about $7 profit. At what, $1.50 for a dual-layer DVD is maybe $18 profit. For copied games.
You got the economics wrong, on both the price setting mechanism and the pirate's cost. Not to say that pirating is right, just stating the facts here.
Simply put, the price is determined by how much the buyer is willing to pay and what other options the buyer has. Since legit XBox360 games costs more than PS2 and Wii games, XB360 buyers will usually be willing to pay more (it didn't bother them that legit XB360 games costs more, so why should they care pirated XB360 games cost more?). Your buddy is good example.
On the cost side, for the pirate the main cost is not the physical disk, but the dubbing equipment and the time it takes to burn the disk. For DL disk, both the time cost and the equipment cost are higher, and thus he will charge you more. Simply assuming DL took twice as long to burn as SL, plus the additional cost of the DL burner can explain a lot of the cost difference.
Accountants and Lawyers have professional bodies (or whatever it is called) that tests candidates wanting to call themselves "accountant" and "lawyer", so do doctors, nurses, engineers, etc, so employers don't need to test the candidates themselves when they want to hire one. if people call themselves "lawyer" or "accountant" without the proper certification, they could be jailed.
Which is the corresponding organization that tested and certified you as an "IT professional"? Can your employer file complaints to that organization and have your certification removed if you displayed incompetence or is negligent in your job? And would anyone risk jail time if they call themselves "IT Professional" without any such certification?
Don't kid yourself, an IT worker is hardly any more "professional" than a secretary or a salesman. Anyone sitting in front of a monitor for the past 10 years can call himself an "IT Professional" with 10 years of experience. Heck, someone who had NOT been sitting in front of a monitor for the past 10 years can also do so! Until we have a widely recognized professional body to certify us (and to de-certify or penalize us if we display incompetence), it is the employers' responsibility to assess our capability and testing us is one way to do it.
I am sure many working in the field would prefer their employers had properly tested themselves and their co-workers, rather than having to fix up problems caused by other less-than-competent "IT Professionals".
If your purpose is to scientifically track and deal with real diseases, reporting from the lab is useful.
If your purpose is to dig up scare stories as headlines to sell newspapers/websites/etc, the which ever way digs up more scare stories (regardless of being true or not) is useful.
"News" have long ago lost any purpose of informing, assume it ever has that in the beginning. Nowadays, "news" is just baits used to catch your attention to advertisers, who are the real customer of any "news" organization, be it newspaper, TV or web site.
Which headline do you think catches more attention (thus earn more profit)? "Some guy lost his Blackberry?" or "Chinese spys strikes again"?
I am quite surprised there will be people replying yet still don't get it even with the hints provided.
It has been years since I worked deeply with C++, but off the top of my head, I can still remember these possible differences.
First, for the simpler cases, when "a" is of the simple types, such as "int", and assume a=10 initially:
1. If f() is declared as f(int& a) - i.e. takes a reference, then might have changed value of a, e.g. set it 20. Then with "f(a); a++;" you get a=21 afterwards. With "f(a++)", a remains 11 since, surprise, a reference to a temporary instance of int of with the old value of a is passed to f().
Second, if "a" is of a class type, e.g. of class "A", it gets even more fun
2. If f() is declared as f(A& a), taking a reference, the usually caveat about modifying a reference to a temporary copy still applies, but now it also depends on how the ++ operator is defined for class A. You know, A::++() could have returned the reference to the same instance afterall, such as if the ++() operator is not about changing value but performing some action. Stupid? As stupid as using the bitshift operator for reading/writing from a stream. Don't underestimate the creativity of your fellow programmers.
3. At the very least, the execution order of the ++ operator and the f() is reversed.
4. Have more fun considering the possibility of global variables modified in f() and the A::++() operator! Remember, the order of execution is different in the 2 cases.
5. If f() is declared as f(A a), have extra fun now you add in the copy operator to the mix for the temporary copy created when f() is invoked! Think again of the different execution order for the 2 calls. Hint: in one case ++() is called first, in the other it is called last.
6. If the above are not enough, consider the possibility that there is no matching function f(A), BUT there is one f(B) where the typecast operator from A->B exists. Have even more fun considering the possible execution order, global variable dependency, etc.
7. Add in the fun with polymorphism with virtual ++ operator, virtual typecast operator, etc.
8. Have extra bonus fun with considering what happens if f() or ++() throws exception (Thanks AC for this, I haven't even considered exception until you mentioned it)
Bottom line is unless you know exactly how f() is defined and exactly how type A is defined, you cannot be sure if it will safe to replace "f(a++)" with "f(a); a++;". Won't that be great if either f() or A comes from a third party library?
When you can't even be sure with basic operations like function call and post-increment operator, it is beyond reasonable to expect a normal average programmer NOT to hit some gotchas in a normal program.
BTW, you Java example is wrong too. It should be replacing "f(foo(a))" with "A a = foo(a); f(a);". And guess what, no matter how f() and foo() is defined, as long as A is the return type of foo(), you can be sure the two forms will give the same results, even in the case of exceptions.