Just b/c Marx wanted it to do one thing, does NOT mean that was the basis of the communism we became familiar w/.
It was obvious that developed countries would most likely not adopt it. Third world countries would be the most likely to switchover.
His insightful comment is not negated at all. It was certainly not obvious that communism wouldn't be adopted. Several industrialised countries practised all sorts of political models. In Marxs time, it was obvious that capitalism in the industrialised world needed to reform itself or be replaced. The problem with Marx is that he discounted the first possibility.
Marx's theories were NOT that communism was an alternative to capitalism.
The marxist position was really more like Capitalism is the problem, communism is the solution.
capitalism would evolve INTO socialism/communism.
Actually, I think he advocated a revolution and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to bring about the change. This is a key point of contention-- a lot of others (including communists) foresaw the obvious problems with this. I think the seizing of the means of production was supposed to be abrupt and violent, because Marx didn't believe that a
process of gradual reform was possible.
Western Europe and to some extent the United States supports this theory. As countries develop stronger economies and wealthier societies, they start deciding that the capitalistic reality of winners and losers is "bad." You end up with ridiculous crap like national health care or other instances of a welfare state (socializing parts of the country).
This is nothing like what Marx proposed. Actually, it is these reforms to capitalism that demonstrate
a major flaw in Marxs premise that capitalism is incurably evil.
I do not, BTW, advocate communism in the least. I'm thrilled that Reagan discredited it by showing the Soviet Union's economy to be a farce.
Reagen had little to do with it. The Soviet economy collapsed because that's what happens to
communist economies. A thriving weapons production
business is not detrimental to an economy. A Marxist economic model is.
Everyone is using 2.95 because the 3.0 series still
has critical ABI bugs, so the distributors won't
include it. 3.1 will be out very soon, and should address these issues
This doesn't say that you can redistribute copies, it only says that you can make them, or more to the point, that the fact that someone makes copies for noncommercial use is not in itself the basis for legal action. This is implied by fair use.
The section you quote does not say that one can't initiate legal action on the basis of redistribution
of copyrighted material.
i am not defending that theory, but your statement borders on the naive: haven't you noticed that in the aftermath the US government got a lot of measures passed without a hitch that its security and law enforcement had tried to push though for years without success?
Not true. Consider the McCarthy era, segregation, the treatement of Japanese during WWII. Bills like the patriot act are a bump in the road in the big scheme of things.
I'm not saying this claim is impossible, merely
very, very, very, highly improbable. Given two
competing claims, one needs to weigh them, and decide which is the more extraordinary claim.
As far as I can tell, there is no supporting evidence in support of this conjecture, and a lot of supporting evidence in favour of a less extraordinary claim (namely, that the worlds most formidable anti-US terrorist group attacked the US)
I should pay the least amount that the recycling depot will take. After all, they are going to profit on my old machine, so they should be treated like any other corp.
I don't think this model precludes a "capitalist" model, but the waste disposal corps client would need to be the PC vendor, and not the customer.
Personally, since I've never had to dispose of a computer (I still have all but one that I've ever bought, the other one I sold) Why should I get stuck with a disposal fee that I may never use?
That computer is not going to last for ever, so you
or a second hand purchaser will need to dispose of it. I don't see any problem with building disposal into the initial cost. It makes it harder to cheat, either by illegal dumping to save money, or by legal dumping (eg "donating" your hazardous waste to someone who can't afford to get rid of it)
Can you prove that the government didn't do it itself?
This is absurd, and doesn't pass the plausibility test. For a start, there is no plausible motive for doing this. If they did want to fabricate an attack to justify a war (they could have IMO justified sending troops to Afghanistan purely on the grounds of the Talibans illegitimate and brutal rule), they could have done so without dsabotaging their economy and killing thousands of Americans.
The only thing he put out of commission was an aspirin factory and some obscure Yugoslavians.
Repeating propoganda from Newsmax isn't going to make it true. You're dead wrong here. Allow me to interrupt with some facts:
Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes, on a suspected chemical weapons site in Sudan, and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. That's what it was at the time. So without recourse to hindsight wisdom, given intelligence that says that the factory in question is producing chemical weapons, what do you do ?
Both attacks had bipartisan support at the time. Supporters included Lott, Gingrich, and Ashcroft.
The obscure Yugoslavians were genocidal communists with an expansionist agenda.
Kind of like the "obscure Vietnamese".
every time a new bin Laden video surfaced, even though they supposedly had proof from the beginning but were never willing to keep Bush's word and share that proof, it makes one wonder if this isn't another example of creating a bogeyman for the American public so they can have a face to hate while the country goes to war.
The Americans had been going after Osama for years. Clinton was trying to get him relatively early in his term. That Osama was involved in terrorist acts against the US, and that his mob were the most formidable anti-US terrorist organisation, is hardly a point of contention.
If you don't believe the evidence, what are the alternative possibilities ?
Wrap your dynamic pointers in handle classes, like reference counted, or clone() based smart pointers. If you need to do a lot of cleanup in catch blocks, it's often a sign that your code is not granular enough.
Also for just-in-time dynamic optimizations, memory management safety, "run-anywhere" (well, declared at least) and standardized distribution/deployment form.
These are useful to varying degrees. GC is very useful, though it's not a magic bullet, and it comes at a high price.
I, personally, believe that the future belongs to dynamic P-code languages such as Ruby and Python. They have clean "native" interfaces, so if you want full speed, you get to the C API and hack away. Or, if you're willing to trade some more performance for the benefits of Java, use Jython.
That's like sayign that the future belongs to screwdrivers, and everyone is going to stop using hammers. I don't buy it. There's more advantages than just speed to a language like C++. Static type checking is extremely useful for large applications.
Python and Ruby are not competitors of C++, they are collaboraters.
you get to the C API and hack away.
Writing objects in C is one hell of a headache. Given the relative ease with which one can put Ruby and Python bindings on C++, C++ makes a better choice for a "low level" language to work in tandem with python or ruby. For example, it's much easier to write a matrix library in C++ than it is to do the same in C (and no-one in their right mind would write low level matrix ops in Ruby or Python, unless developer time was in very short supply, or there was an abundance of spare CPU cycles)
Above all, each of them has a clearer and less convoluted syntax. Java, Smalltalk, and Objective-C all offer (in my opinion, in any case) a superior object model to C++.
The "cleanliness" and "superior object model" is a design tradeoff, it is not superior design. For example, you can be more consistent by not having the notion of "values" versus "references" versus "pointers" that you have in C++. But having these things offers compatibility with C, better performance, and a language that offers more in the way of static checking. This "elegance" you speak of does have some real world benefits, but the tight static checking and high performance offered by C++ also have real world benefits, and MLOC multi platform applications exist as proof of concept.
I admit, I'm not a master at the language, but the amount of work it would take to do so seems somewhat ludicrous.
Perhaps you should do some reading (-;
By comparison, it's easy to master C,
Depends on what you mean by "master". If "master"
requires that you are capable of writing object oriented code, then it's really not that easy to "master" C. It's actually harder, because using encapsulation, modules, polymorphism and objects takes some discipline and skill. Any idiot
can write fortran in C, but that's not "mastering" it.
Smalltalk and Obj-C because of the tight design and relative smallness of the languages in comparison to C++.
The apparent simplicity of these languages is a design tradeoff. There are a lot of good reasons why C++ did not choose the saqme tradeoffs, and they are all documented in Design and Evolution.
I agree that bad programmers will always find a way to do damage, but C++ gives far more ammunition than most languages. Every syntactic structure is another noose to hang yourself with.
Any useful tool can be abused.
The fact of the matter is that you don't need a language like C++ to to big projects, write complicated systems, or have a flexible system.
The fact of the matter is that C++ works very well for precisely this.
I'd argue that Objective-C and it's runtime system are far more flexible, easier to program, and have done a good job at implementing a complex system (ie. OSX).
Being "flexible" and "easy to program" is not necessarily a good thing for implementing large scale software. I'm not sure which parts of OSX are written in ObjC, but that sort of object model certainly works well in GUI components.
Many more eloquent people than me can tell you what's right with Obj-C and what's wrong with C++.
So what ? Many eloquent people can explain what's right with fascism and what's wrong with democracy. That doesn't make it true.
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one
So where does he say that we should stop using C++ and start using objective C instead ?
I'd rather be using Objective-C, though. It always stuns me that an excellent language like Obj-C (or even Smalltalk, for that matter) never really got popular, and an extremely complicated language with a few benefits over C got super popula
May I suggest you do some research into how and why C++ became popular ? C++ has an enormous number of benefits over C. To suggest otherwise is laughably ignorant. Thinks like built in support for OOP, parametrised types, and even a useful, well designed set of container classes are in themselves an enormous benefit.
As for Obj C and Smalltalk, you disingeneously claim they are "better than" C++. They are not. They embrace different design tradeoffs to C++. Smalltalk and Obj C offer little or nothing in the way of static checking, which can be problematic when developing and debugging large applications.
It's sad that after more than 10 years, C++ compilers all over the place still have a lot of trouble compiling C++ code.
ANSI/ISO is still only 3 years old. Features to support code like Loki (templates, partial specialisations, MI) were not a part of the original AT&T implementation. So a big part of the problem is that it's been a moving target. But then, this is true of most useful languages in their early stages. C for example was standardised in 1989, 18 years after Bell implemented it.
What draws people to Java is not only the simplicity of the language for programmers.
The simplicity is a tradeoff. Java trades compile time optimisations, performance and static type safety for simplicity. This is not "better", or "worse", it's just "different".
Note that Java, like C++, is still very much a moving target.
It's also the fact that most compilers have no trouble compiling your code on all platform.
Java has its share of version compatibility issues, caused by the fact that it's a moving target. It's also worth noting that a lot ot the "different compilers" license code from Sun. Look how long it's taking for a (working!) free implementation of java on Linux to appear.
I think that's a point that most C++ folks (including Herb in the article) fail to understand.
On the contrary, Herb is insightful to understand that other languages also have their advantages. He's a strong advocate of learning other programming languages.
I personally believe that there is another way [sf.net], and that new programming languages [sf.net] are still a good idea.
Matz (the Ruby guy) said in response to "why another language", that if someone found Ruby useful, that was a good enough reason for him. I think this is a good philosophy.
I love C but hate C++ b'se no one follows the standards.
This is factually inaccurate in the extreme. Everyonefollows the standards. Meaning that they're still playing catch-up. The standard was new in 1998, so if you have much experience, then there wasn't an official C++ standard when you took your first course.
We waste a lot of resources learning them and their ever-changing standards that no one follows.
Those resources could be well spent developing designs, patterns, e.t.c.
This is a false either-or dichotomy. Time is spent developing this stuff, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't develop new espresso machines.
Give us the means to talk to our IDEs in plain language and have them translate (crunch out the code) everything for the dumb machine.
The developer should not be bothered with that!
The problem is that you need to be able to express your ideas in a coherent, logical format. The machine can't do your thinking for you. Having finished grad school in math, where you don't need to write code, only state your ideas clearly, it's simply not as easy as a superficial glance might make one think.
Most people can't do that. If they could, they'd be orders of magnitude more productive, and software wouldn't have any bugs (yeah, right)
Computer Science is not about being a codemonkey. Computer science is not even about writing code.
True, but you have to be able to write some form of code (even if it's pseudocode) to express yourself coherently. Learning the theory of computer science requires some basic skills with respect to presenting algorithms coherently.
. I see no problem in talking with another student to gain a better understanding of the concept so long as the student does his/her own work.
In this instance, it appears that the student didn't do his/her own work.
any idiot can pick up a book on C++ and learn it,
I'd like to see that (-; Most of the instructors at the school I'm at don't have a very good understanding of C++, and some of them are reasonably bright people.
You'll blow a lot of time in refactoring
and testing. Don't confuse appropriate
design with BDUF. Appropriate design is
not only not impossible, it is done all the
time.
I agree, but the poster I responded to suggested 99% of the time should be design. IMO, that exceeds "appropriate" and it's what I'd consider a futile attempt to pump more resources into something that offers diminishing returns.
I disagree. I have worked on dozens of projects, where we architected not only for the immediate deadline, but for the ongoing phases as well.
I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do this. I'm saying that doing this alone will not solve all of your problems, and even if you do up-front design, you still won't succesfully anticipate all design needs.
Basically, the more central a component, the more important to get it right. A component that is tightly coupled with your entire system (for example, the base class of a broad and deep heirarchy) is almost impossible to change gracefully, so you'd better design it.
On the other hand, implementing a button as a two level heirarchy with an abstract class is pointless, because you'll probably find the initial design breaks when you add a new button, because the abstraction serves no immediate purpose, and because at present, the button class is not tightly coupled with your other code.
design is everything. that is where you try to predict all the problems that might occur.
Predicting problems that might occur is one thing, predicting changing requirements is another. You can reasonablt anticipate problems based on prior experience. But it's difficult to guess at changing requirements, especially when the requirements come from an external source.
I don't think it's an accident that respect for the law declines most sharply in the US where the law is seen as an unfair, outside force meant to protect the privileged from the rest,
Seriously, you should get out more. What "protects the powerful" is not law, but lawlessness and corruption. And there are many countries where corruption is a tool that is used to slam doors in the faces of those who don't have "the right connections". The notion of fair and due process not only exists in the US, it is enshrined in the law. Disclosure requirements for public corporations, safety standards, anti discrimination laws, etc etc. In the US, the little guy has at least some means to fight back, whether it's through the media, or legal system, in other countries they would just disappear and no-one would notice.
and the white from the non-white.
Is this some sort of race-baiting exercise ? Sorry, no cigar. It's true that "non-whites" commit a large number of crimes, but the real concern is protecting them from each other (minorities are usually the victims of minority crime).
Look at the push for hate crimes and affirmative action legislation, etc. Of course, not everyone agrees with every proposal, but a reasonable person cannot deny that treating minorities fairly is a topic that Americans feel is an important one, and that is reflected in the political discourse and its media coverage.
This whole thing also assumes that money is the only measure of a life.
It is not a good measure, but it is a measure. The alternative "spiritual satisfaction" definition is not something that can be measured, which is why it's not a reliable source of quantitative data.
It is true that one can be sick, poor, but happy. However, it's certainly easier to be happy if you're healthy and live comfortably and safely.
If two people ran for election, one promised to increase the standard of living, the other promised spiritual happiness, who would win ? I'd vote for the guy promising something tangible, even though I'd prefer improve my "spiritual happiness" than get rich.
When the number of people being enslaved rises due to globalization, when the number of people being degraded rises due to globalization, when the number of people who are suffering from toxin related illness rises due to globalization, when the number of people being harmed, maimed, or killed by companies unwilling to invest in safety practices rises due to globalization, then things are getting worse.
Except you don't show there is an existing trend, let alone making an argument that it's "caused" by globalisation (as opposed to, say, population growth)
Also, for what it's worth, infant mortality and starvation are not meaures of quality of life. Neither of them change based on how people live - they only change based on how people die.
One can't enjoy life while they're dead. That point aside, starvation is a slow and painful death, and high levels of starvation go hand in hand with large numbers of people who are constantly hungry and malnourished. Infant mortality and starvation are reasonable indicators
of public health.
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It was obvious that developed countries would most likely not adopt it. Third world countries would be the most likely to switchover.
His insightful comment is not negated at all. It was certainly not obvious that communism wouldn't be adopted. Several industrialised countries practised all sorts of political models. In Marxs time, it was obvious that capitalism in the industrialised world needed to reform itself or be replaced. The problem with Marx is that he discounted the first possibility.
The marxist position was really more like Capitalism is the problem, communism is the solution.
capitalism would evolve INTO socialism/communism.
Actually, I think he advocated a revolution and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to bring about the change. This is a key point of contention-- a lot of others (including communists) foresaw the obvious problems with this. I think the seizing of the means of production was supposed to be abrupt and violent, because Marx didn't believe that a process of gradual reform was possible.
Western Europe and to some extent the United States supports this theory. As countries develop stronger economies and wealthier societies, they start deciding that the capitalistic reality of winners and losers is "bad." You end up with ridiculous crap like national health care or other instances of a welfare state (socializing parts of the country).
This is nothing like what Marx proposed. Actually, it is these reforms to capitalism that demonstrate a major flaw in Marxs premise that capitalism is incurably evil.
I do not, BTW, advocate communism in the least. I'm thrilled that Reagan discredited it by showing the Soviet Union's economy to be a farce.
Reagen had little to do with it. The Soviet economy collapsed because that's what happens to communist economies. A thriving weapons production business is not detrimental to an economy. A Marxist economic model is.
This doesn't say that you can redistribute copies, it only says that you can make them, or more to the point, that the fact that someone makes copies for noncommercial use is not in itself the basis for legal action. This is implied by fair use. The section you quote does not say that one can't initiate legal action on the basis of redistribution of copyrighted material.
Or because it's harder to steal a hard drive.
People are willing to spend a pretty penny for storage; they aren't willing to drop $18 for two singles and filler.
But if it were more difficult to obtain the music without paying for it (or easier to steal disk drives) ... ?
Not true. Consider the McCarthy era, segregation, the treatement of Japanese during WWII. Bills like the patriot act are a bump in the road in the big scheme of things.
I'm not saying this claim is impossible, merely very, very, very, highly improbable. Given two competing claims, one needs to weigh them, and decide which is the more extraordinary claim. As far as I can tell, there is no supporting evidence in support of this conjecture, and a lot of supporting evidence in favour of a less extraordinary claim (namely, that the worlds most formidable anti-US terrorist group attacked the US)
I don't think this model precludes a "capitalist" model, but the waste disposal corps client would need to be the PC vendor, and not the customer.
That computer is not going to last for ever, so you or a second hand purchaser will need to dispose of it. I don't see any problem with building disposal into the initial cost. It makes it harder to cheat, either by illegal dumping to save money, or by legal dumping (eg "donating" your hazardous waste to someone who can't afford to get rid of it)
Can you prove that the government didn't do it itself?
This is absurd, and doesn't pass the plausibility test. For a start, there is no plausible motive for doing this. If they did want to fabricate an attack to justify a war (they could have IMO justified sending troops to Afghanistan purely on the grounds of the Talibans illegitimate and brutal rule), they could have done so without dsabotaging their economy and killing thousands of Americans.
Repeating propoganda from Newsmax isn't going to make it true. You're dead wrong here. Allow me to interrupt with some facts:
The Americans had been going after Osama for years. Clinton was trying to get him relatively early in his term. That Osama was involved in terrorist acts against the US, and that his mob were the most formidable anti-US terrorist organisation, is hardly a point of contention. If you don't believe the evidence, what are the alternative possibilities ?
So tell us, when are you planning to move to a country who practices such a philosophy ?
Wrap your dynamic pointers in handle classes, like reference counted, or clone() based smart pointers. If you need to do a lot of cleanup in catch blocks, it's often a sign that your code is not granular enough.
These are useful to varying degrees. GC is very useful, though it's not a magic bullet, and it comes at a high price.
I, personally, believe that the future belongs to dynamic P-code languages such as Ruby and Python. They have clean "native" interfaces, so if you want full speed, you get to the C API and hack away. Or, if you're willing to trade some more performance for the benefits of Java, use Jython.
That's like sayign that the future belongs to screwdrivers, and everyone is going to stop using hammers. I don't buy it. There's more advantages than just speed to a language like C++. Static type checking is extremely useful for large applications.
Python and Ruby are not competitors of C++, they are collaboraters.
you get to the C API and hack away.
Writing objects in C is one hell of a headache. Given the relative ease with which one can put Ruby and Python bindings on C++, C++ makes a better choice for a "low level" language to work in tandem with python or ruby. For example, it's much easier to write a matrix library in C++ than it is to do the same in C (and no-one in their right mind would write low level matrix ops in Ruby or Python, unless developer time was in very short supply, or there was an abundance of spare CPU cycles)
The "cleanliness" and "superior object model" is a design tradeoff, it is not superior design. For example, you can be more consistent by not having the notion of "values" versus "references" versus "pointers" that you have in C++. But having these things offers compatibility with C, better performance, and a language that offers more in the way of static checking. This "elegance" you speak of does have some real world benefits, but the tight static checking and high performance offered by C++ also have real world benefits, and MLOC multi platform applications exist as proof of concept.
I admit, I'm not a master at the language, but the amount of work it would take to do so seems somewhat ludicrous.
Perhaps you should do some reading (-;
By comparison, it's easy to master C,
Depends on what you mean by "master". If "master" requires that you are capable of writing object oriented code, then it's really not that easy to "master" C. It's actually harder, because using encapsulation, modules, polymorphism and objects takes some discipline and skill. Any idiot can write fortran in C, but that's not "mastering" it.
Smalltalk and Obj-C because of the tight design and relative smallness of the languages in comparison to C++.
The apparent simplicity of these languages is a design tradeoff. There are a lot of good reasons why C++ did not choose the saqme tradeoffs, and they are all documented in Design and Evolution.
I agree that bad programmers will always find a way to do damage, but C++ gives far more ammunition than most languages. Every syntactic structure is another noose to hang yourself with.
Any useful tool can be abused.
The fact of the matter is that you don't need a language like C++ to to big projects, write complicated systems, or have a flexible system.
The fact of the matter is that C++ works very well for precisely this.
I'd argue that Objective-C and it's runtime system are far more flexible, easier to program, and have done a good job at implementing a complex system (ie. OSX).
Being "flexible" and "easy to program" is not necessarily a good thing for implementing large scale software. I'm not sure which parts of OSX are written in ObjC, but that sort of object model certainly works well in GUI components.
Many more eloquent people than me can tell you what's right with Obj-C and what's wrong with C++.
So what ? Many eloquent people can explain what's right with fascism and what's wrong with democracy. That doesn't make it true.
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one
So where does he say that we should stop using C++ and start using objective C instead ?
BTW, I know what it is, and I've never needed it.
May I suggest you do some research into how and why C++ became popular ? C++ has an enormous number of benefits over C. To suggest otherwise is laughably ignorant. Thinks like built in support for OOP, parametrised types, and even a useful, well designed set of container classes are in themselves an enormous benefit.
As for Obj C and Smalltalk, you disingeneously claim they are "better than" C++. They are not. They embrace different design tradeoffs to C++. Smalltalk and Obj C offer little or nothing in the way of static checking, which can be problematic when developing and debugging large applications.
ANSI/ISO is still only 3 years old. Features to support code like Loki (templates, partial specialisations, MI) were not a part of the original AT&T implementation. So a big part of the problem is that it's been a moving target. But then, this is true of most useful languages in their early stages. C for example was standardised in 1989, 18 years after Bell implemented it.
What draws people to Java is not only the simplicity of the language for programmers.
The simplicity is a tradeoff. Java trades compile time optimisations, performance and static type safety for simplicity. This is not "better", or "worse", it's just "different".
Note that Java, like C++, is still very much a moving target.
It's also the fact that most compilers have no trouble compiling your code on all platform.
Java has its share of version compatibility issues, caused by the fact that it's a moving target. It's also worth noting that a lot ot the "different compilers" license code from Sun. Look how long it's taking for a (working!) free implementation of java on Linux to appear.
I think that's a point that most C++ folks (including Herb in the article) fail to understand.
On the contrary, Herb is insightful to understand that other languages also have their advantages. He's a strong advocate of learning other programming languages.
I personally believe that there is another way [sf.net], and that new programming languages [sf.net] are still a good idea.
Matz (the Ruby guy) said in response to "why another language", that if someone found Ruby useful, that was a good enough reason for him. I think this is a good philosophy.
This is factually inaccurate in the extreme. Everyone follows the standards. Meaning that they're still playing catch-up. The standard was new in 1998, so if you have much experience, then there wasn't an official C++ standard when you took your first course.
We waste a lot of resources learning them and their ever-changing standards that no one follows. Those resources could be well spent developing designs, patterns, e.t.c.
This is a false either-or dichotomy. Time is spent developing this stuff, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't develop new espresso machines.
Give us the means to talk to our IDEs in plain language and have them translate (crunch out the code) everything for the dumb machine. The developer should not be bothered with that!
The problem is that you need to be able to express your ideas in a coherent, logical format. The machine can't do your thinking for you. Having finished grad school in math, where you don't need to write code, only state your ideas clearly, it's simply not as easy as a superficial glance might make one think. Most people can't do that. If they could, they'd be orders of magnitude more productive, and software wouldn't have any bugs (yeah, right)
True, but you have to be able to write some form of code (even if it's pseudocode) to express yourself coherently. Learning the theory of computer science requires some basic skills with respect to presenting algorithms coherently.
. I see no problem in talking with another student to gain a better understanding of the concept so long as the student does his/her own work.
In this instance, it appears that the student didn't do his/her own work.
any idiot can pick up a book on C++ and learn it,
I'd like to see that (-; Most of the instructors at the school I'm at don't have a very good understanding of C++, and some of them are reasonably bright people.
I agree, but the poster I responded to suggested 99% of the time should be design. IMO, that exceeds "appropriate" and it's what I'd consider a futile attempt to pump more resources into something that offers diminishing returns.
I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do this. I'm saying that doing this alone will not solve all of your problems, and even if you do up-front design, you still won't succesfully anticipate all design needs.
Basically, the more central a component, the more important to get it right. A component that is tightly coupled with your entire system (for example, the base class of a broad and deep heirarchy) is almost impossible to change gracefully, so you'd better design it.
On the other hand, implementing a button as a two level heirarchy with an abstract class is pointless, because you'll probably find the initial design breaks when you add a new button, because the abstraction serves no immediate purpose, and because at present, the button class is not tightly coupled with your other code.
Predicting problems that might occur is one thing, predicting changing requirements is another. You can reasonablt anticipate problems based on prior experience. But it's difficult to guess at changing requirements, especially when the requirements come from an external source.
Seriously, you should get out more. What "protects the powerful" is not law, but lawlessness and corruption. And there are many countries where corruption is a tool that is used to slam doors in the faces of those who don't have "the right connections". The notion of fair and due process not only exists in the US, it is enshrined in the law. Disclosure requirements for public corporations, safety standards, anti discrimination laws, etc etc. In the US, the little guy has at least some means to fight back, whether it's through the media, or legal system, in other countries they would just disappear and no-one would notice.
and the white from the non-white.
Is this some sort of race-baiting exercise ? Sorry, no cigar. It's true that "non-whites" commit a large number of crimes, but the real concern is protecting them from each other (minorities are usually the victims of minority crime). Look at the push for hate crimes and affirmative action legislation, etc. Of course, not everyone agrees with every proposal, but a reasonable person cannot deny that treating minorities fairly is a topic that Americans feel is an important one, and that is reflected in the political discourse and its media coverage.
It is not a good measure, but it is a measure. The alternative "spiritual satisfaction" definition is not something that can be measured, which is why it's not a reliable source of quantitative data.
It is true that one can be sick, poor, but happy. However, it's certainly easier to be happy if you're healthy and live comfortably and safely.
If two people ran for election, one promised to increase the standard of living, the other promised spiritual happiness, who would win ? I'd vote for the guy promising something tangible, even though I'd prefer improve my "spiritual happiness" than get rich.
Except you don't show there is an existing trend, let alone making an argument that it's "caused" by globalisation (as opposed to, say, population growth)
Also, for what it's worth, infant mortality and starvation are not meaures of quality of life. Neither of them change based on how people live - they only change based on how people die.
One can't enjoy life while they're dead. That point aside, starvation is a slow and painful death, and high levels of starvation go hand in hand with large numbers of people who are constantly hungry and malnourished. Infant mortality and starvation are reasonable indicators of public health.