The same fear of the unkown or simple misinformation applies to nuclear topics as well.
Don't try to lump together unrelated topics to push your personal political agenda.
A key step in the generation of nuclear power has never successfully been demonstrated to be solvable, let alone economically solvable: waste disposal. People like you apparently like to pretend nuclear waste just can be made to disappear somehow, but right now, it is stored at a large cost to the tax payer, under constant guard and supervision. Long-term storage has not been implemented, and its safety has not been verified in the real world; all people have is a lot of ideas and suggestions.
Yes, this is "fear of the unknown": generating huge amounts indestructible, highly toxic radioactive waste without knowing where to dispose of it safely is something to be feared by any rational being.
As for hydrogen storage, even there, people are justified to be concerned. Commercial hydrogen filling stations are fairly unproven technology. Even though the hydrogen may be safer than gasoline, the overall risk may still be larger because an explosion might be more likely due to unexpected engineering problems (hydrogen affects metals) and new kinds of human errors.
"A lot easier" doesn't mean that much: you have potentially more than 100 nations generating indestructible, highly toxic materials and you are relying on every single one of them to get the storage exactly right. Do you trust Afghanistan to do the right thing with nuclear waste? Some African nation in the middle of a civil war? Who guarantees no terrorist is going to dig up the stuff? Who is going to pay for the engineering, land, and legal costs to build 10000 year secure storage facilities? So far, not even the US has managed to do this. And the only reason nuclear energy is cost-effective at all is because the nuclear plant operators don't even have to pay those costs--the tax payer does.
Between creating indestructible, highly toxic materials and unremovable gases that change global climate and coastlines, neither is a good choice. The best choice is still to reduce consumption and increase the use of alternative energy.
The authors looked at what would happen if a significant percentage of the earth's surface was covered with wind farms; most advocates of alternative energy sources propose a diverse mix of different renewable energy sources. And, yes, it would have an effect. Probably, an effect not very different from the effect of having lots of forests.
Unlike greenhouse gas emissions, the effect is immediately reversible (CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, but wind farms could be stopped or removed), and it mostly counteracts the consequences of the greenhouse effect (e.g., it creates arctic cooling).
The author himself states that he thinks that this is unquestionably preferable to greenhouse gases--he called it a "no brainer", actually.
If they would just compete without using their control over the OS as leverage, they would not be so bad (and maybe out of business?).
How is that different from what Apple does? If anything, Apple's desktop integration with on-line properties is even tighter.
It's not competition if they make it the default home page in IE from now on. And don't think for a moment they won't (for new installs anyways).
It does hurt their competitors, but what else do you want them to do? It's not a nice situation, but I can't figure out a mechanism to stop them from doing it that doesn't do more harm than good.
No, but it looks like they are gearing up to; they have said so themselves on several occasions and stated clearly that they intend to use patents against open source.
'People here' are against anything Microsoft does, from enforcing its copyrights, to moving into new markets.
You are trying to imply that people have a knee-jerk reaction against Microsoft, but that's a lame excuse. Usually, when Microsoft gets into hot water, they deserve it: they just do so much that is technically bad, unethical, and/or anti-competitive.
Microsoft enforcing their copyrights by itself is not something people generally find objectionable.
Welcome to the real world, where usually no solution is ever perfect. Instead, we try to reduce problems as much as possible
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
No. You specify how many bits a particular source needs to spend, and therefore mailing lists that you know you are on would not be affected.
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
Users of email don't even have to notice.
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
They are increasingly being filtered out by their providers anyway.
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
While, of course, manually sifting through megabytes of spam or living with a significant number of dropped messages due to content-based spam filtering is completely "practical", right?
You don't understand the difference between copyrights and patents.
Many people here are for Microsoft enforcing Microsoft copyrights to the full extent of the law: only if Microsoft actually enforces their copyrights do people realize how overpriced their software actually is. But Microsoft marketing knows full well that the company wouldn't exist without widespread piracy. Selective and inconsistent enforcement by companies like Microsoft is a huge problem.
What people get upset about is when Microsoft applies for patents on technology they usually didn't invent or that is blatantly obvious and then try to enforce those patents.
It's not a "rip off" when multiple companies offer similar products, it is competition. Competition is a good thing: it lowers prices and improves products. And while Google has some good technology, they company didn't come into being in a vacuum and they don't own the idea of citation and reference analysis, either legally or scientifically.
"Lower what prices?" you might ask. Well, Google isn't a charity. I expect Microsoft will compete with them on advertising rates and whereever else Google makes money.
The only thing that may be considered unfair about that is that Microsoft can afford to make losses for many years on this before driving Google out of business. But that's a problem everybody faces when Microsoft enters a new market.
Plug and go where, exactly? How networking and security needs to get configured is pretty standardized. Either the AirTunes is not standard, or it's not secure, or its users have to put up with the same nuisances as everybody else. There is no magic fourth option. And Apple isn't the first compan to come up with proprietary "solutions" to the problem of network configuration that are supposed to make people's lives easier--as long as you keep buying from them only.
I assert that moving away from C/C++ in an attempt to escape buffer overflows is not only misguided, but unnecessary if you use the the Better String Library.
Your better string library only deals with strings, but buffer overflows occur in many different data types. And C/C++ make it easy to make a large number of other mistakes that lead to safety and/or security problems. And even within your better string library, you still require programmers to be rather careful.
The whole "using C/C++ inevitably leads to buffer overflows" idea gets thrown out the window if you are using it.
C/C++ does not lead inevitably to buffer overflows. In fact, there are many programming styles one can adopt in C/C++ that avoid buffer overflows and other common errors altogether. Your better string library doesn't even get close to what is possible with careful, high-quality coding in C/C++.
However, the problem with C/C++ is not what it can't do, it's all the stuff that it can do. Your code may be OK and my code may be OK, but 99% of the code out there isn't.
even if they plug C# for everything, most of microsoft's code is written in C++
Yes, but Microsoft has seen the error of their ways.
As for the security flaws in the STL
STL doesn't have security flaws, it lacks safety (lack of safety often leads to lack of security, but it has other bad consequences as well).
I don't think that's going to be less secure than the same thing effectively implemented in other languages.
No, STL is uniquely bad; it is simultaneously unnecessarily general and lacks crucial error checking. I can't think of any other major language that has such a poorly designed set of collection classes as part of its standard library.
Yes, but with those people in the Rocket, successful re-entry is likely since they are very succssful people.
I doubt it, since gravity is unaffected by lies, smear campaigns, daddy's connections, affectations of a deep Christian faith, the Supreme Court, or fear mongering. That is, the usual dirty tricks of Bush and his staff just don't work against gravity. But they have so successfully used them to cheat their way to the presidency twice that, I suppose, they might feel invincible and give it a try anyway.
As for tools, I wholeheartedly agree - and you should check out Microsoft's FXCop and Prefast.
We are discussing the shortcomings of C/C++, not.NET. FXCop may still be necessary for.NET applications, but not for the shortcomings we are discussing. With.NET, Microsoft has essentially admitted themselves that C/C++ are a dead end.
As for the "you should check out", you should get out a bit more if you think that there is anything novel about FXCop or Prefast; those kinds of tools have been around for ages.
Eventually, we'll have replaced all the legacy code that uses fixed-size buffers. (I'd hope that new code uses string classes instead.. surely newbie programmers will use them instead of that complicated pointer arithmetic-style string buffers. surely)
Trouble is: even the C++ standard library isn't anywhere near safe, and people are still generating buggy and unsafe code in C++ code; even textbooks encourage them to.
And less efficient than error checking built into the compiler ? Why ? It's error checking done by the compiler, only the error checks aren't hardcoded in the compiler, but implemented by the standard library.
Let me give an example. A good compiler in a language with array bounds checks knows enough about array bounds checking in order to eliminate it a lot of the time. But if you implement arrays as library classes, it is much harder (and possibly impossible) for the compiler to eliminate such checks.
If you program in C++, you're supposed to use the standard library containers.
The C++ standard library containers aren't safe either.
I also though that C++ sucked until I learned to use it properly.
I don't think C++ sucks at all--I like programming in it. What I don't like is dealing with other people's C++ code because it is usually full of stupid and unnecessary bugs.
It's enough, only if properly used. There's no need for new tools.
So, what do you propose? People are writing software. People are using these tools improperly every day. There are thousands of books, seminars, classes, courses, code reviews, and management strategies and they are still using these tools improperly. Obviously, education isn't going to fix the problem and people aren't going to change. So, whatever improvements we are going to get will have to come from elsewhere.
What's the point of creating new tools when the old one are rarely ever used properly, anyway ?
The point is to create tools that make it less likely that imperfect, flawed, real-world programmers shoot themselves (or others) in the foot. The point is to create tools that are designed in such a way that programmers are more likely to use them properly.
So is being distanced from the hardware good or bad?
The issue has nothing to do with distance from the hardware. The kind of pitfalls C and C++ have are avoidable even in low-level languages.
The problem with compiled languages like C(++) are that you DO have to deal with memory management directly, thus creating buffer overflow exploits. However, all languages are vulnerable to input verification problems, of which buffer overflows are a subset.
We fix things one problem at a time. We can't do anything about general input verification, but we can help sloppy programmers avoid problems with buffer overflows and memory allocation by automating it.
The problem is sloppy programmers, not bad languages, compiled or otherwise.
These are the sloppy programmers that are writing the code we all use. Preaching at them hasn't helped for the last several decades, so it isn't going to help now. Whether it is their moral failing that they produce bugs or not, obviously, they need something else to help them produce better code.
We put safety features into lots of products: plugs, cars, knives, etc., because we know people make mistakes and people are sloppy. Trying to build programming languages without safety features and then blaming the programmer for the invariable accidents makes no sense.
Furthermore, the difference between compilation and interpretation is not particularly distinct these days, anyway,
The presence of safety features does not depend on the nature of the language. You can have a language identical in semantics, performance, and flexibility to C (or C++) and make it much less likely that people will accidentally make errors in it (while probably being more productive at the same time).
If it were that simple, than there should be no buffer overflows in modern C/C++ programs. But it apparently isn't that simple, for several reasons. Using container libraries costs extra time and effort, and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example. Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.
To dismiss such concerns as "borderline troll material" is just stupid; apparently, you think that any opinion that inconveniences you should just be suppressed. Look at the bug lists and security alerts: the problem isn't going away. We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
There are saner languages where such things aren't as common. While Lisp
You make it sound as if avoiding buffer overflows is some kind of obscure, costly language feature. No. C/C++ are exceptional (exceptionally bad) in that they permit this; most programming languages don't permit this to happen, and many of them still give you about the same performance and the same low-level control as C/C++.
How does one do the same thing with respect to buffer overflows and C or C++, AND still have things look and work like C or C++?
It's not hard, you just need to distinguish two kinds of pointers: the safe variety (like object and array "references" in Java) and the unsafe variety (like the ones used by C programmers). The unsafe variety is where all the problems come from and it only needs to be used rarely.
Software development isn't physics, so there are many random exceptions to rules.
Of course, Apache and IIS have lots of other differences: in the number of people working on them, in the kind of people working on them, in the kinds of libraries they use, etc., so it doesn't even even have to be an exception. For example, simply the fact that Apache is an open source project might be enough to explain why it is less buggy than IIS despite being widely used and being written in C.
The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
Well, so do I. And part of those economic incentives is proper accounting for the cost business activity imposes on others. It's a property rights issue, really.
What would that mean? We need to account for every ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere and charge accordingly, including historical emissions (discounted by what has been removed from the atmosphere since, but that's not much), because all that carbon is causing problems today. Under such a proper accounting, the US and Europe come off far worse than under Kyoto.
If they could be more efficient without raising costs, they would be already. [...] Economics 101.
Maybe it would be good for you to progress to Economics 102. Economics has concepts like path dependencies, public goods, barriers to entry, and sunk costs. Because of them, individuals and companies fail to do many things that would be good for them in the long run. It is one function of governments to help markets over those bumps.
Furthermore, the market is already developing clean and efficient technologies and they would be adopted in time on their own; but government intervention now can accelerate the process, which would be good for our long-term competitiveness and efficiency, even if it means less consumption in the short term.
it does NOT put restrictions on developing nations,
Why should it? The US and Europe have emitted most of the extra greenhouse gases now in our atmosphere. The fair thing would be to greatly reduce emissions in the US and Europe and to give developing nations a chance. And if we can't do that, we should actually compensate the developing nations for their share of global emissions that they were entitled to but didn't get to make.
It's like the US and Europe raiding a penny jar shard by the whole office. Now that it's almost empty, rather than returning the amount of money that went beyond their fair share, they are complaining that they can't keep taking out of it.
If they want the treaty to be approved it has to treat everyone the same, this one doesn't.
The US and Europe had a century of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions and used it to grow their economies rapidly. "Treating everyone the same" would mean giving China and India the same opportunity.
Besides, what about leading by setting a good example? And do you really want China and India to lead with energy efficient (and hence cost effective) new technologies while the US falls further and further behind? Why do you think the UK lost their leadership role?
Slashdot Mirror
The same fear of the unkown or simple misinformation applies to nuclear topics as well.
Don't try to lump together unrelated topics to push your personal political agenda.
A key step in the generation of nuclear power has never successfully been demonstrated to be solvable, let alone economically solvable: waste disposal. People like you apparently like to pretend nuclear waste just can be made to disappear somehow, but right now, it is stored at a large cost to the tax payer, under constant guard and supervision. Long-term storage has not been implemented, and its safety has not been verified in the real world; all people have is a lot of ideas and suggestions.
Yes, this is "fear of the unknown": generating huge amounts indestructible, highly toxic radioactive waste without knowing where to dispose of it safely is something to be feared by any rational being.
As for hydrogen storage, even there, people are justified to be concerned. Commercial hydrogen filling stations are fairly unproven technology. Even though the hydrogen may be safer than gasoline, the overall risk may still be larger because an explosion might be more likely due to unexpected engineering problems (hydrogen affects metals) and new kinds of human errors.
I don't' agree with the Green's emotional hatred of nuclear power. You can not conserve your way to a better future.
Well, and "the Greens" don't agree with your knee-jerk, emotional approval of nuclear power, either.
Come back when you are willing to have a rational debate, without presupposing that everybody who disagrees with you must be irrational.
"A lot easier" doesn't mean that much: you have potentially more than 100 nations generating indestructible, highly toxic materials and you are relying on every single one of them to get the storage exactly right. Do you trust Afghanistan to do the right thing with nuclear waste? Some African nation in the middle of a civil war? Who guarantees no terrorist is going to dig up the stuff? Who is going to pay for the engineering, land, and legal costs to build 10000 year secure storage facilities? So far, not even the US has managed to do this. And the only reason nuclear energy is cost-effective at all is because the nuclear plant operators don't even have to pay those costs--the tax payer does.
Between creating indestructible, highly toxic materials and unremovable gases that change global climate and coastlines, neither is a good choice. The best choice is still to reduce consumption and increase the use of alternative energy.
The authors looked at what would happen if a significant percentage of the earth's surface was covered with wind farms; most advocates of alternative energy sources propose a diverse mix of different renewable energy sources. And, yes, it would have an effect. Probably, an effect not very different from the effect of having lots of forests.
Unlike greenhouse gas emissions, the effect is immediately reversible (CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, but wind farms could be stopped or removed), and it mostly counteracts the consequences of the greenhouse effect (e.g., it creates arctic cooling).
The author himself states that he thinks that this is unquestionably preferable to greenhouse gases--he called it a "no brainer", actually.
If they would just compete without using their control over the OS as leverage, they would not be so bad (and maybe out of business?).
How is that different from what Apple does? If anything, Apple's desktop integration with on-line properties is even tighter.
It's not competition if they make it the default home page in IE from now on. And don't think for a moment they won't (for new installs anyways).
It does hurt their competitors, but what else do you want them to do? It's not a nice situation, but I can't figure out a mechanism to stop them from doing it that doesn't do more harm than good.
Microsoft has never used patents aggressively.
No, but it looks like they are gearing up to; they have said so themselves on several occasions and stated clearly that they intend to use patents against open source.
'People here' are against anything Microsoft does, from enforcing its copyrights, to moving into new markets.
You are trying to imply that people have a knee-jerk reaction against Microsoft, but that's a lame excuse. Usually, when Microsoft gets into hot water, they deserve it: they just do so much that is technically bad, unethical, and/or anti-competitive.
Microsoft enforcing their copyrights by itself is not something people generally find objectionable.
Welcome to the real world, where usually no solution is ever perfect. Instead, we try to reduce problems as much as possible
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
No. You specify how many bits a particular source needs to spend, and therefore mailing lists that you know you are on would not be affected.
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
Users of email don't even have to notice.
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
They are increasingly being filtered out by their providers anyway.
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
While, of course, manually sifting through megabytes of spam or living with a significant number of dropped messages due to content-based spam filtering is completely "practical", right?
You don't understand the difference between copyrights and patents.
Many people here are for Microsoft enforcing Microsoft copyrights to the full extent of the law: only if Microsoft actually enforces their copyrights do people realize how overpriced their software actually is. But Microsoft marketing knows full well that the company wouldn't exist without widespread piracy. Selective and inconsistent enforcement by companies like Microsoft is a huge problem.
What people get upset about is when Microsoft applies for patents on technology they usually didn't invent or that is blatantly obvious and then try to enforce those patents.
It's not a "rip off" when multiple companies offer similar products, it is competition. Competition is a good thing: it lowers prices and improves products. And while Google has some good technology, they company didn't come into being in a vacuum and they don't own the idea of citation and reference analysis, either legally or scientifically.
"Lower what prices?" you might ask. Well, Google isn't a charity. I expect Microsoft will compete with them on advertising rates and whereever else Google makes money.
The only thing that may be considered unfair about that is that Microsoft can afford to make losses for many years on this before driving Google out of business. But that's a problem everybody faces when Microsoft enters a new market.
Well, maybe computers should just get smart enough to figure it out for themselves, instead of turning a billion web authors into markup slaves.
Plug and go where, exactly? How networking and security needs to get configured is pretty standardized. Either the AirTunes is not standard, or it's not secure, or its users have to put up with the same nuisances as everybody else. There is no magic fourth option. And Apple isn't the first compan to come up with proprietary "solutions" to the problem of network configuration that are supposed to make people's lives easier--as long as you keep buying from them only.
I assert that moving away from C/C++ in an attempt to escape buffer overflows is not only misguided, but unnecessary if you use the the Better String Library.
Your better string library only deals with strings, but buffer overflows occur in many different data types. And C/C++ make it easy to make a large number of other mistakes that lead to safety and/or security problems. And even within your better string library, you still require programmers to be rather careful.
The whole "using C/C++ inevitably leads to buffer overflows" idea gets thrown out the window if you are using it.
C/C++ does not lead inevitably to buffer overflows. In fact, there are many programming styles one can adopt in C/C++ that avoid buffer overflows and other common errors altogether. Your better string library doesn't even get close to what is possible with careful, high-quality coding in C/C++.
However, the problem with C/C++ is not what it can't do, it's all the stuff that it can do. Your code may be OK and my code may be OK, but 99% of the code out there isn't.
even if they plug C# for everything, most of microsoft's code is written in C++
Yes, but Microsoft has seen the error of their ways.
As for the security flaws in the STL
STL doesn't have security flaws, it lacks safety (lack of safety often leads to lack of security, but it has other bad consequences as well).
I don't think that's going to be less secure than the same thing effectively implemented in other languages.
No, STL is uniquely bad; it is simultaneously unnecessarily general and lacks crucial error checking. I can't think of any other major language that has such a poorly designed set of collection classes as part of its standard library.
Yes, but with those people in the Rocket, successful re-entry is likely since they are very succssful people.
I doubt it, since gravity is unaffected by lies, smear campaigns, daddy's connections, affectations of a deep Christian faith, the Supreme Court, or fear mongering. That is, the usual dirty tricks of Bush and his staff just don't work against gravity. But they have so successfully used them to cheat their way to the presidency twice that, I suppose, they might feel invincible and give it a try anyway.
As for tools, I wholeheartedly agree - and you should check out Microsoft's FXCop and Prefast.
.NET. FXCop may still be necessary for .NET applications, but not for the shortcomings we are discussing. With .NET, Microsoft has essentially admitted themselves that C/C++ are a dead end.
We are discussing the shortcomings of C/C++, not
As for the "you should check out", you should get out a bit more if you think that there is anything novel about FXCop or Prefast; those kinds of tools have been around for ages.
Eventually, we'll have replaced all the legacy code that uses fixed-size buffers. (I'd hope that new code uses string classes instead.. surely newbie programmers will use them instead of that complicated pointer arithmetic-style string buffers. surely)
Trouble is: even the C++ standard library isn't anywhere near safe, and people are still generating buggy and unsafe code in C++ code; even textbooks encourage them to.
And less efficient than error checking built into the compiler ? Why ? It's error checking done by the compiler, only the error checks aren't hardcoded in the compiler, but implemented by the standard library.
Let me give an example. A good compiler in a language with array bounds checks knows enough about array bounds checking in order to eliminate it a lot of the time. But if you implement arrays as library classes, it is much harder (and possibly impossible) for the compiler to eliminate such checks.
If you program in C++, you're supposed to use the standard library containers.
The C++ standard library containers aren't safe either.
I also though that C++ sucked until I learned to use it properly.
I don't think C++ sucks at all--I like programming in it. What I don't like is dealing with other people's C++ code because it is usually full of stupid and unnecessary bugs.
It's enough, only if properly used. There's no need for new tools.
So, what do you propose? People are writing software. People are using these tools improperly every day. There are thousands of books, seminars, classes, courses, code reviews, and management strategies and they are still using these tools improperly. Obviously, education isn't going to fix the problem and people aren't going to change. So, whatever improvements we are going to get will have to come from elsewhere.
What's the point of creating new tools when the old one are rarely ever used properly, anyway ?
The point is to create tools that make it less likely that imperfect, flawed, real-world programmers shoot themselves (or others) in the foot. The point is to create tools that are designed in such a way that programmers are more likely to use them properly.
So is being distanced from the hardware good or bad?
The issue has nothing to do with distance from the hardware. The kind of pitfalls C and C++ have are avoidable even in low-level languages.
The problem with compiled languages like C(++) are that you DO have to deal with memory management directly, thus creating buffer overflow exploits. However, all languages are vulnerable to input verification problems, of which buffer overflows are a subset.
We fix things one problem at a time. We can't do anything about general input verification, but we can help sloppy programmers avoid problems with buffer overflows and memory allocation by automating it.
The problem is sloppy programmers, not bad languages, compiled or otherwise.
These are the sloppy programmers that are writing the code we all use. Preaching at them hasn't helped for the last several decades, so it isn't going to help now. Whether it is their moral failing that they produce bugs or not, obviously, they need something else to help them produce better code.
We put safety features into lots of products: plugs, cars, knives, etc., because we know people make mistakes and people are sloppy. Trying to build programming languages without safety features and then blaming the programmer for the invariable accidents makes no sense.
Furthermore, the difference between compilation and interpretation is not particularly distinct these days, anyway,
The presence of safety features does not depend on the nature of the language. You can have a language identical in semantics, performance, and flexibility to C (or C++) and make it much less likely that people will accidentally make errors in it (while probably being more productive at the same time).
If it were that simple, than there should be no buffer overflows in modern C/C++ programs. But it apparently isn't that simple, for several reasons. Using container libraries costs extra time and effort, and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example. Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.
To dismiss such concerns as "borderline troll material" is just stupid; apparently, you think that any opinion that inconveniences you should just be suppressed. Look at the bug lists and security alerts: the problem isn't going away. We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
There are saner languages where such things aren't as common. While Lisp
You make it sound as if avoiding buffer overflows is some kind of obscure, costly language feature. No. C/C++ are exceptional (exceptionally bad) in that they permit this; most programming languages don't permit this to happen, and many of them still give you about the same performance and the same low-level control as C/C++.
How does one do the same thing with respect to buffer overflows and C or C++, AND still have things look and work like C or C++?
It's not hard, you just need to distinguish two kinds of pointers: the safe variety (like object and array "references" in Java) and the unsafe variety (like the ones used by C programmers). The unsafe variety is where all the problems come from and it only needs to be used rarely.
Software development isn't physics, so there are many random exceptions to rules.
Of course, Apache and IIS have lots of other differences: in the number of people working on them, in the kind of people working on them, in the kinds of libraries they use, etc., so it doesn't even even have to be an exception. For example, simply the fact that Apache is an open source project might be enough to explain why it is less buggy than IIS despite being widely used and being written in C.
He is right on. But it takes a lot of people like you in the industry, people who just don't get it, to keep the current state going.
The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
Well, so do I. And part of those economic incentives is proper accounting for the cost business activity imposes on others. It's a property rights issue, really.
What would that mean? We need to account for every ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere and charge accordingly, including historical emissions (discounted by what has been removed from the atmosphere since, but that's not much), because all that carbon is causing problems today. Under such a proper accounting, the US and Europe come off far worse than under Kyoto.
If they could be more efficient without raising costs, they would be already. [...] Economics 101.
Maybe it would be good for you to progress to Economics 102. Economics has concepts like path dependencies, public goods, barriers to entry, and sunk costs. Because of them, individuals and companies fail to do many things that would be good for them in the long run. It is one function of governments to help markets over those bumps.
Furthermore, the market is already developing clean and efficient technologies and they would be adopted in time on their own; but government intervention now can accelerate the process, which would be good for our long-term competitiveness and efficiency, even if it means less consumption in the short term.
it does NOT put restrictions on developing nations,
Why should it? The US and Europe have emitted most of the extra greenhouse gases now in our atmosphere. The fair thing would be to greatly reduce emissions in the US and Europe and to give developing nations a chance. And if we can't do that, we should actually compensate the developing nations for their share of global emissions that they were entitled to but didn't get to make.
It's like the US and Europe raiding a penny jar shard by the whole office. Now that it's almost empty, rather than returning the amount of money that went beyond their fair share, they are complaining that they can't keep taking out of it.
If they want the treaty to be approved it has to treat everyone the same, this one doesn't.
The US and Europe had a century of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions and used it to grow their economies rapidly. "Treating everyone the same" would mean giving China and India the same opportunity.
Besides, what about leading by setting a good example? And do you really want China and India to lead with energy efficient (and hence cost effective) new technologies while the US falls further and further behind? Why do you think the UK lost their leadership role?