Define you.

Are you a troll, or do you genuinely fail to realize that a good half of the problems on your list are best solved using techniques based in calculus? I mean seriously, physics is a waste of your time, but you'd like to program robots. That's...that's just dumb.

An alcoholic father begs his son to never drink, because he fears his son is at risk of becoming like him and wants better. The son, having watched him struggle with finances and go in and out of rehab for years on end gets the point, despite the fact that his father is hung over as he gives his lecture.

A politician speaks of the dangers of alcohol to society. He takes a hardline stance against it, supporting zero-tolerance measures, and campaigns for prohibition. He declares these things to be his deeply held personal beliefs. When asked about the martini in his hand, he dodges the question and waits for his supporters to drown out the interviewer with calls to "keep the candidate's personal life out of the debate."

One of these men is clearly and self-evidently speaking what they truly believe, and holds himself up as a warning to others at cost to himself. The other one is lying for his own benefit. Can you tell which is which?

It's still incredibly handy for things like reflection and dynamic dispatch systems.

It's been ages since I worked with Java, but even if I hadn't been hearing for years how far Java's come since the bad old days, I'd feel compelled to call you on some of this bullshit...

A note before I start: I mostly work on video games, and I use a mix of C++ (engine), C# (custom build tools, editors, etc), various scripting languages (Lua, Python, etc: some embedded in the engine, others for automating aspects of the build). I've also written the odd business app in C# and, way back when, Delphi.

On the contrary, one often wants simple values to behave like objects, such as when one wishes to declare groups of arbitrary values for serialization or the like. Having the compiler or runtime autogenerate an object version of your value types and provide a simple syntax for converting between the two forms is a huge time saver and spares one from writing a lot of tedious code.

It also lacks the diamond problem. I mean, yeah, a competent programmer can work around that, sure. A competent programmer can also structure his code such that it doesn't require MI, without needlessly complicating anything.

Nothing stops you from using C's (or any other) preprocessor with Java (or any other compiler that takes text files as input). That's where C++'s preprocessor (which most good C++ programmers recommend avoiding) came from, you know. Actually, in the bad old days, C++ itself was a preprocessor...

Because a programmer writing business apps has more interesting things to think about than making sure that his colleague remembers that foo() returns an object out of a memory pool which shouldn't be deleted or referenced beyond the end of the current transaction, whereas bar()'s return needs to be freed by returning it to a free list, and whether he can afford to pay the extra allocations and cache misses necessitated by returning shared_ptr wrappers that remember that for his colleague, or whether it's time to sit down and write two whole new pointer-wrapping classes (and if those wrappers use a reference count, should we put it in the object or allocate that from some special pool...), or whether he should return raw pointers and make a note to spend a few minutes during every future code review checking that they're not being misused...

Wait, where did shared_ptr come from? Why am I thinking of writing classes to wrap pointers? I just want to return a dynamically allocated object! What happened to not writing extra classes?

The GC is, like all other software, entirely deterministic - in exactly the same way that malloc/free and new/delete's continue to behave deterministially when the heap becomes fragmented. The phrase you're looking for is "as strictly defined as my arbitrarily chosen reference point". Millisecond stalls at unspecified intervals to transparently collect garbage are entirely within the definition of well-behaved for a very large class of software.

And a language in which 95% of objects don't hold non-garbage-collected resources doesn't need destructors, let alone deterministic ones. The other 5% have a method called something synonymous with "close" on them, and competent programmers remember to call those functions, just as you remember to call (or write/use a class which will call) delete or free on the 95% of objects which are pure structured memory on top of that 5%.

By the way, how is it that C++'s most useful feature (destructors) only works with classes? I thought extra classes were a bad thing. And what's all this copy constructor and assignment operator crap I have to write to make those extra classes either work right or fail to compile in all possible cases? I just want to write a one-off wrapper around X, not a goddamn library...

Fixed that for you. And that's assuming I agree that "deterministic" means "having all aspects of execution at least as strictly defined as C++", which I don't.

Or are you really asserting that nobody has ever written well-behaved software in Java, C# (well, anything.NET), Python, Ruby, Lua, or Lisp, etc? Really?

Tip: if you want to bitch about GC, bitch about the ways in which it complicates or outright precludes pointer math. And then watch those of us writing the sort of apps that Java/.NET/many interpreted languages are suited for carry on not giving a damn.

I agree with everything except the portion regarding portions. What we eat is largely determined by culture, but how much of it we eat is a function of human biochemistry, applied to said cuisine. Replacing things like fats and fiber (which trigger the body's satiety response) with things like processed sugars (which don't, despite their high calorie content) is going to lead to an increase in the size of servings as, given the choice, people don't stop eating until they're full. So yes, controlling food content, particularly the use of processed sugars (HFCS and table sugar are the same thing to your body - I mean for that term to include both), could be expected to have an effect on both average portion size and obesity.

Other than that, though, I couldn't agree more, especially the comment about exercise, which is massive factor, as exercise not only burns calories, but has been shown to increase the effectiveness of the systems that regulate hunger, countering the tendency to over-consume in the first place.

Ignorance is not a point of view.

It depends on your definition of bullying - specifically how malicious someone needs to be before they go from asshole to bully.

There's a lot of low-grade petty bullshit which really does go away if you ignore it properly. That's mostly coming from the mass of kids who are insensitive but not particularly enthusiastic about their cruelty. They want a quick laugh if they can get one, they know there's a chance some kid will get upset, they'll use the opportunity to do some little thing when they see him in the hall, but they're not gonna do fuck all beyond that because their attention spans frankly aren't that long. If you don't react to them, you're not worth their while, and they'll move on to another target.

From the victim's point of view, well...that's about as bad as the sociopathic fucks can be. The sociopaths, at least, aren't everywhere at once - in every hall, bathroom, buss, and classroom - and you can often see them coming and prepare. It also engenders a sense of alienation that leaves the victim especially vulnerable to the real sociopaths, who's victims tend to be a subset of the kids the student body designates to be the outsiders.

I imagine most people who say "oh just ignore them and it'll be better - worked great for me!" were either only suffering from the general low-grade shit or they suffered from both but became less attractive targets for the bullies once they'd stopped being everyone else's target and moved a step or two up the social ladder.

That said, GP needs to work on his tone and stop conflating cliches or his personal experience with the whole of reality.

Your experience roughly matches mine.

The only way they were useful is if you could trick them into monitoring the situation without actually reporting it (even indirectly). Shit like, if someone's harassing you at your locker, you keep requesting a new lock every other month (at a time when other students are in the office close enough to overhear) because maybe you forgot your locker open (though you swear you remember locking it up), but you think someone might have seen your combo (no, nobody in particular, and you certainly wouldn't make an accusation without evidence), and now some of your stuff's gone missing, again...

But that's only going to work for a very small subset of the bullied and only in schools where the administration hasn't completely detached itself from the spirit of its responsibilities.

So you read the first half of my first sentence and, well, what did you do after that? It didn't involve any reading or comprehension that I can tell.

I won't, because I didn't say you did.

You expressed concern over, of all things, terrorists doing (presumably evil) things with nuclear waste. My point is that, beyond how ridiculous it is to fear terrorists in general, it's ridiculous to be in particular fear of nuclear waste which is far easier to deal with (contain, reprocess, secure) than the byproducts of mining and chemical refineries.

It would, in fact, be easier for terrorists to use a perfectly ordinary bomb to crack open a high-pressure storage tank at a chemical plant (the sort of plants we'll need more of if we wanna ramp up solar cell production) on a day when the wind is blowing right. Blowing up the chemical plant requires building a normal bomb and sneaking it through a largely outdoor security perimeter. Making a dirty bomb requires, on top of building the same bomb and sneaking it to its target site, breaking into a secured building with thick, shielded walls, operating the heavy machinery it takes to manipulate the (monitored) waste, getting out with said waste (past all sorts of radiation sensors), and then living long enough in the presence of such radiation to build and detonate their bomb, all without alerting anyone to what they're doing until the bomb goes off...

If terrorism is a good argument against any industrial pursuit (and it's not), then it's an even better argument against your preferred energy technologies...so why are you bringing it up, again?

Yeah. Better to have all the shit coal mining and power generation throws into the environment slowly poison us every day of our lives than live in fear of a death statistically as likely as being struck by lightning. Heaven forbid that waste be in a form that's compact, easily contained, at a location of our choosing (so we can find it if we think of better ways to contain/dispose of it)...

I mean you do know what chemical plants, fuel storage facilities, and tailings dams are, right? You've surely seen what happens when one of those fails catastrophically. Do you oppose any expansion of mining or heavy industry in general because you're scared of terrorists?

Well, maybe you do. Terrorists really are that scary, after all...

Hey idiot, if I buy the thing (even at retail!), it's mine to do with as I please. The only thing your Dear Corporate Leader's IP stops me doing is duplicating it (or, were I unfortunate enough to live in a corporatocracy, fucking with the DRM).

You do know what "mine" means, yeah? Refers to this silly little notion called "property", I'm sure you've heard of it somewhere...

(Yeah, feeding the troll, the answer's more for the mass of mindless like-minded retards we've all seen around here - for instance ones that modded him up as of when I wrote this.)

Like deep-sea drilling platforms? Or oil refineries? Or tailings ponds near mines?

You do know that radiation isn't the only type of pollution that can kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land unusable for long periods of time (impacting the livelihood of yet more tens of thousands), yes? I mean look at this explosion (one of several due to this quake): lots of people are going to get sick and die as a result of god knows what fumes that's spewing, and there's no way to even try to contain those fumes. How is that an acceptable risk to build while nuclear plants (the ones currently failing in slow-motion giving people time to evacuate and adapt containment strategies) are not?

The nuclear waste "problem" has been studied extensively, and technical solutions already exist, both in terms of reducing the existing waste and in terms of reducing the amount of waste to be produced in the future. The only people ignoring anything are the NIMBY oh-it's-not-100%-safe crowd, and the only thing they're ignoring are the actual solutions which already exist and would be built today if not for fucking politics.

Neat how all the waste was in one place where they could get to it to fix the problem. Funny how that doesn't work with the sort of exhaust that coal plants produce...

Russia has a problem because they didn't care to handle the waste responsibly. First it was more important building the great Soviet arsenal, then it was more important raping what was left of the economy so there would be no money to deal with the problem. That's, again, a political problem, not a technical one. It certainly isn't restricted to the nuclear industry.

See China for more of the same.

Correct, in the sense that nobody can guarantee you that no radiation will ever leak anywhere ever at all. However nuclear is demonstrably many times safe-er than coal, and will continue to be so even if both of these plants go full Chernobyl. It's silly to piss ourselves over the prospect of nuclear accidents when we already accept not just the risk, but the actual fact, of far greater environmental damage in order to run our coal-fired plants and drive our cars.

It's pathetic that we refuse to replace a terrible, continuously polluting, and highly prone to catastrophic failure solution with one that produces only a tiny fraction as much ongoing pollution and is only slightly prone to catastrophe, because the average person is under the impression that radiation is that much scarier than toxic fumes and iridescent mining sludge.

The point is you'll be doing work to port the rendering code anyway, so where you start is irrelevant.

He was pretty clear about that (allowing for arbitrary accuracy).

What I'm saying is that the idea of "consciousness" is akin to the idea of "four". It's a property of the particular arrangement of the matter in our bodies, an abstract quality that we made up to describe some interesting aspect of that arrangement. If I add two marbles to two or three marbles to one, the "fourness" of the resulting groups is the same. Even if the marbles in the two groups are made of entirely different substances.

If I build a machine that perfectly simulates the activity in a brain and, at some instant, is configured to perfectly match your internal state, it is at that moment as much "you" as you are "you". Doubtless, that would cease to be true almost immediately (you you and computer you don't occupy the same space, you'll get different inputs, have different experiences and diverge quite rapidly), but for that one instant there is no way for me to walk in and tell which is which if all I can see is the internal state of both minds.

The only way I can differentiate the two of "you" at that instant is by expanding the idea of "you" to include things "attached" to the consciousness (the body hosting it). But then what if I were to build not a computer but an atom for atom perfect duplicate of you? Then I'd have to tell you apart by your positions in space, or maybe by the history of the individual particles that comprise each copy or something like that. But that's odd, because where you stand and which ocean some molecule of water in your body last evaporated off of clearly isn't who you are, right?

He said:

And I'm saying it makes as much sense to say that as it does to say "there is no way to transfer the four-ness of the two and two marbles - the real four-ness, the essence of four or whatever - into the three and one marbles". There's nothing to transfer and no intrinsic difference within the relevant domain to allow one to meaningfully pin the label "real" to one object but not the other.

Only if you see the consciousness as some sort of physical object.