o2sd

Thanks for enlightening me. Welch's tenure ended in 2001, by which time 40% of GE's revenues were from GE Capital, who were actively engaged in derivatives markets and had large exposures that would have gone bad even if they hadn't levered up from 2002 to 2006.

There are many other criticisms of Welch's tenure that come to the conclusion that GE did well DESPITE Jack Welch, not because of him. Here is a tasty link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Criticism

At any rate, I personally think that CEOs are figureheads of companies and the only things about a CEO that makes any difference is a) how good a head of hair they have b) how tall they are c) which ivy league school they attended and if they shared a class with anyone now at Goldman Sachs

At least he was a Chemist, and not one of those idiot Physicists ;)

Is this the same Jack Welch that nearly bankrupted the world's largest company through high risk speculation in financial markets?

>> TrueCrypt's deniability was broken in 2008.

Citation?

>> I'm not sure if they fixed it since then.

Maybe you could find out and post something useful.

Actually, this article reads like a play book for the next group who wants to create 'MegaUpload2'. 1) Secure your servers 2) Encrypt your email 3) Keep a low profile 4) Hide your identity 5) etc

1. Register (with email) for practices - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND 2. Python only - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND 3. Skype required - THAT INFORMATION WAS NOT PROVIDED BEFOREHAND

-1 fail and don't send me any spam on my email addy.

> I've visited twice, read a lot, and conversed with a number of people who've lived there.

So did I before I lived there. Once you live there for a while (a year or more), you begin to understand that much of what you thought was true is merely a thin façade.

Still, compared to it's neighbours, it has come a long way. Mostly due to importing expertise and technology from the West.

>I admire how productive and peaceful Singapore is, with high living standards

It's not particularly productive. Singapore lives off the proceeds of its port and it's oil Bourse.It IS peaceful, I'll grant you that. When you have police with automatic weapons,ready to use, in plain view it tends to chill people out.

> a large degree of economic freedom/opportunity

A 'large degree'? Sounds very Singaporean. :)

>continuing effective investment in infrastructure and education

Debatable. Certainly that is the Govt. line, but like much in SGP, the reality is very different.

> From what I've read, its health-care system delivers results as well as any other highly-developed country, at much lower costs.

I know this is a BIG issue for USians, but most developed countries don't spend much time thinking about their health care system. It's taken for granted, because it is always there, and mostly works (with exceptions).

> Often not worth it, C is the lowest common denominator of languages, if you want to be accessible to all languages... you'll probably use C.

Personally I see that not so much as a feature of C, but as a limitation of other languages. Interoperability is a Hard Problem(tm) which deserves more thought and effort than it currently receives. It's easy to say 'If you want interoperability, use C' because that's the current state of affairs. It would be better if interop was a solved problem.

Thanks for replying. I lived in Singapore for a year, and my experience of the place was very different from yours is, so I am interested in your perspective.

From your reply, I understand that you are running a startup in Singapore? I am particularly interested in why you find Singapore good in that regard. Apart from the low taxes, my experience of Singapore would indicate to me that it is a very difficult place for a technology startup for the following reasons (if you could refute these I would be most interested).

1. The large and ongoing diaspora of educated, intelligent engineers who find the constant censorship and nonsensical propaganda distasteful and leave for free-er pastures. Making it difficult to hire and keep technical people locally.

2. The abysmal state of internet services. I found internet to be slow, unavailable, expensive, monitored and censored.

3. Despite the low taxes, the cost of living is very high. The Lee family (through Temasek and the Government) control the supply and demand for housing and use that leverage to apply a 'rental tax' on guest workers which is a way of distributing wealth from the middle class 'migrant' workers to the local population (who receive preferential terms for loans and purchase price of Government housing. There is typically a 300 bps spread between the loan and the rental yield). Food and transport is also expensive.

4. Related to 1 & 2, the general antithetic feeling towards free speech.

5. The city is boring as hell. It has some good museums, and a couple of interesting nightspots, but generally not much goes on. Anyone doing anything interesting risks fining, caning, jailing or all three. For technical people this is a big downside.

Apart from those, there are some things I do agree with you on. 1. The city is very safe (except for Dengue fever), and very clean, something that appeals to technical people.

2. The weather is excellent if you like 28 deg Celsius @ 85% humidity 300 days of the year. (I don't, but SGP does have A/C almost everywhere.)

3. It IS a great base for travelling in SE Asia. For North Asia, I think HK is better.

And some, not so much. 1. The public transport is not particularly reliable, except in Govt. statistics. The buses are often late, are very slow and badly organised. The trains are fine as long as you don't have to change lines, then they seem to be deliberately mis-timed. I was in Singapore when the train breakdowns occurred. On the green line they did not have enough power to run the line, so they started turning the A/C off.

2. The food ranges from mediocre (and expensive) to food poisoning. How you find the food will depend on which country you arrived from. For me, it was uninspiring.

Every place has good points and bad. On balance, I personally felt that the bad outweighed the good, but there were other contributing factors to that decision. I am still curious as to why you think it is a good city for a startup. Regards, o2sd

> If you're passionate about computing and software engineering, you'll have a natural interest in how things work under the hood.

When I was 12, I learned 6502 assembly language. The computer I had did not have a C compiler, only BASIC or assembler (you could also enter hex into memory locations, which was hardcore). Learning assembly is actually a LOT easier than people make out. Assembly is basically mnemonics for the underlying machine code, plus named locations. Assembly has everything a language needs for Turing completeness. Assign, Add, Subtract, Compare, Branch. And THAT is how the computer works 'under the hood'. C is one level of abstraction above that, and while it's true that a LOT of software has been historically written in C, before C came along, most software was written in assembler or BASIC (which is older than C, for the historians).

> Learning C is almost mandatory if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole is.

Not really. I know what is going on 'down there', regardless of which language was used to compile the machine code. What is REALLY useful is to have really succinct, powerful, high-level abstractions to build software quickly and with as little code as possible.

> Knowing it will certainly help when exploring the intricacies of processors and operating systems.

If that's what you want to do, then fine. I'm too much of a utilitarian for that kind of exploration. I want to build stuff.

I think if you want to understand what's going on 'down there' in the 'rabbit hole', learn assembly language. There are only seven to ten basic instructions and you can learn them in a couple of days. You can build anything you want in assembly language, if you have an eternity to do it in.

> Singapore has many admirable qualities

Could you enumerate them? Do you (or have you) live(d) in Singapore?

If I wanted to do iOS/Cocoa programming, I would go straight to Objective-C, bypassing C without stopping, but that's me.

I learned C++ without ever learning C. Although, one could make the argument that in learning C++, I learned about 80% of C anyway. I can debug and fix C code, but I don't enjoy it, and avoid it if possible.

C is interesting, in the same way that Cuneiform is interesting. Personally I just find the Roman alphabet a lot more productive.

Thanks for your reply.

> Not all of us see C++ as an improvement over C.

I know, but you are the first I've encountered to quantify it.

> The result is code that is easily FFI'able from any language

I agree that this is a big advantage for interoperability. While it's possible to build an interface in C++ with 'extern C', it means maintaining two call APIs rather than one. Still I see this as a current limitation of C++ rather than an advantage of C.

> Using a simple macro in C:

Is generally a pain as the macro is expanded at compile time and causes difficulties debugging. Your point about VTABLEs is well taken however and I have encountered subtle bugs with virtual member functions in C++.

> If I want to get speed via multi-core rather than pure uniprocessor speed, why use C++? I can use Haskell and get much easier and safer parallelism with many other advantages.

You would need to enumerate those advantages for me to answer. Why then wouldn't you use Haskell instead of C?

OK. NOT TROLLING, but can I ask why anyone would want to learn C, other than to develop device drivers, kernel modules or other arcane software that is yet to be replaced by C++?

I asked this question of a younger programmer the other day, because it seemed to me, that to HIM, learning C was a rite of passage, and that he was less of a man for not knowing it.

I find macho philosophies in software development both amusing and counter-productive.(If you really want to be macho, become a lisp hacker). My amusement may be personal, but the counter-productivity of using C, when better abstractions (i.e. programming languages) already exist, is real. It creates fiefdoms and priesthoods that are counter-evolutionary and hard to maintain, and leads the death of much software.

Personally, I would rather std::string be pored over by many eyeballs and evolved than change strcpy to _strcpy or strlcpy. Unless I am working for NASA on an embedded device for a satellite, I would rather Moore's law or SMP or DSMP give me the speed I need, than give up productivity to squeeze every last CPU cycle. Developer time is a lot more expensive than hardware (except on satellites and space stations).

Apologies if it is your ambition to work for NASA on embedded devices in space stations, I just think you may as well learn C++. You get most of C, plus some really useful and productive abstractions as well.

If you want speed, learn inter-process communication and the principles of symmetric multi processing. With C++, you also get to abstract away the problems of strcpy and strlen, replace Byzantine function references with class methods, and 35 parameter functions with polymorphism. Best of all, most of the programming world will still think you are manly if you know C++, so you get that too.

> That being said, I never felt particularly inclined to write the whole things in C++.

Agreed, however one of the problems we are encountering is passing messages efficiently between RoR and the C++ components. Currently using XML until another method that is more efficient, but no less flexible, presents itself.

Personally I think the debate should be less focused on which language to write your web application in, and more on improving the glue between different languages so in developing web applications we can have the best of all possible worlds.

I am currently writing part of a web application in C++, the other part of the web application is being developed by another programmer in Ruby On Rails.

In a single request, the RoR part 'does' about a two dozen 'things', which takes it around 2 seconds to complete.

The C++ part 'does' around 1.2 million 'things' which takes it between 0.1 to 0.2 seconds to complete. Building the the component that does 1.2 million 'things' is simply impractical in Ruby.

Admittedly, very few web applications have this type of requirement, but perhaps in the future many more will. The two dozen or so 'things' the RoR does would take a LOT of code in C++. Well, compared to RoR it would be a lot of code. And the 1.2 million 'things' that the C++ application does would be absurdly difficult to program in Ruby, and as mentioned, would take an absurdly long time to execute.

So at the risk of sounding cliché, perhaps it is less a matter of Ruby vs C++, and more one of using the right tool for the job. Once that decision has been made, programmer productivity has more to do with the programmer than the language. I am extremely productive in C++, even though I have to write a lot of code to be productive. If I was a LISP expert, I would be ridiculously productive, but only after 10 years[1] of learning and gaining experience in LISP. Most projects don't have 10 years for you to become productive in the language of choice.

[1] Yes, I am exaggerating. It would only take 9 years to become highly productive in LISP.

Noam Chomsky once noted that the problem of the soundbite age is that some questions don't have simple answers that fit inside 30 seconds or 2 minutes.

The main problem with SOPA is that it is not possible to solve a market problem with legislation. Copyright infringement is a market problem, and markets are a lot more effective in delivering solutions than Governments. Consequently, SOPA will utterly fail to prevent copyright infringement, resulting in even MORE draconian laws sometime in the future.

Specific to the problem of music and film is that these markets are highly regulated oligopolies that use their market power to engage in price fixing. Unlike efficient markets, in which there are a range of different prices, the music and film markets only have two prices: Idiotically expensive and free (illegal).

Personally, I would LOVE to pay $1 per episode to watch my favourite HBO series at a time, and in a place of my own choosing. Sadly I cannot. Hence, I either don't watch it at all, or I obtain it by 'other' means. Monopolies/oligopolies only offer one price, and they are free to gouge their customers as long as they can prevent any competition in the market.

In other words, SOPA is NOT about preventing piracy (because that is a hopeless cause, much like the war on drugs), but about protecting the music and film industries illegal, anti-competitive price fixing practices (by way of preventing any other production/distribution of that type of media). Illegal price fixing is a small price that all Governments will gladly pay, as music and film support the propaganda/mythology creation industry of Government.

The simplest solution to prevent piracy would be to open the music and film markets to competition, but that is exactly what the RIAA and MPAA are trying to prevent.

> Most sane people support sane IP legislation.

Too ambiguous and vague. IP legislation that was written at the time of the constitution is perfectly suitable for the modern age without the need to extend forever.

> It's perfectly reasonable for IP holders to want to have legal recourse against the bad guys.

What is reasonable is a LIMITED monopoly on the copying of an artistic medium as long as it 'promotes the arts and sciences'. The goal of copyright and patent law is to maximise the benefits of art and technology TO SOCIETY, not to some corporation. The method of doing this is to grant a LIMITED TIME monopoly over a creation as an incentive to create, not to make corporations more profitable. Once that LIMITED TIME has passed, the creation enters the public domain and society as a whole accrues the benefits. Having infinitely extendable copyrights/patents, copyrights owned by corporations renders the purpose of copyright/patents NULL AND VOID, because society never accrues the benefit associated with the cost (i.e. the monopoly).

> There are lots of people making a lot of money selling a lot of illegal merchandise online.

No, there isn't. There are some, always have been, always will be, because when a market for goods or services is inefficient, it changes the risk/reward ratio for 'cheaters'. Look at the market for drugs for example. The risks are huge, but the rewards are ridiculously higher in proportion. As long as the risk/reward ratio is skewed (i.e. the market is inefficient), there will always be 'cheaters' or 'criminals' in that market. Turning your country into a police state might be one way to stop that, but it may also kill the market you are trying to protect.

I think this Bill will be good for the world. By the 'world', I mean anywhere that is not the United States of America.

The US has outsourced it's manufacturing, rationalized retail into behemoth monopolies and completely destroyed it's capital markets with rampant corruption and incompetence.

The ONLY area in which the US still is a leader and an innovator is in the internet/web, and now the US government is planning to destroy that as well.

Soon the rest of the world will be providing all kinds of services to US citizens behind the silicon curtain, to allow them to illicitly access information without fear of censorship or imprisonment.

Alternative DNS, proxies, darknets will spring up in the free world, giving the disenfranchised and repressed USians a voice and access to otherwise subversive websites that have forums with comments.

Actually, LOTS of people benefit. In no particular order: 1) Wackenhut (GEO group), private prison operator, and the entire prison complex (guard's unions etc) 2) Law enforcement. Even if the DEA had a 99% interception rate, that economics of the trade mean that it is still profitable at 1% supply. Hence, no matter how many busts the DEA makes, they will always need more resources/money/helicopters etc. 3) Banking and Finance. Drug money is the global financial system's liquidity float. It kept Wachovia solvent for nearly a decade. 4) The US Treasury. Do your own research. Suffice it to say, opium production in Afghanistan now exceeds pre-Taliban levels.