what you've just said... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul...

the US DoED has nothing to do with this.
i know people on the right like to mock the department of education, as if education and a department to oversee it are bad things.
but this view is born out of ignorance over what exactly the department of education even DOES.

unlike most countries, the US DoED has almost nothing to do with curriculum.
most of thethey do is disburse funds from the fed to the states, along with some minor oversight responsibilities regarding civil rights on college campuses. That's it. But after articles like this, and others, maybe they should have something to do with curriculum.

Also, fun fact: the republicans opposed the creation of the US DoED as well. Apparently they were of the opinion that education is unconstitutional because education is not in the constitution...boy, they've sure come a long way in 40 years, haven't they ?

Obviously the threshold of proof for the latter is a lot higher.

You mean like entering into said contract with burner everything, provided in a kit with instructions on how to avoid methods designed to detect a high likelihood of said contract breach?

The thread is about Java being/not being an appropriate mid-point between Pyt hon-like interpreted languages and C++ like compiled languages.

Well, first, C++, Java and Python all have multiple inheritance. Java just only does it with interfaces. Which you objected to by stating no one did multiple inheritance except Python.

But at a higher level, this sub-thread seems to be about your assertions that duck-typed and interpreted languages are superior to compiled languages.

Someone thinking of calling the function should certainly see it.

Really? Cause I can think of a lot of reasons that's not the case. Just in like 2 minutes:

1. It got autopopulated in my IDE, and *sounds like* the function I intend to use. Possibly even one I've used before and am mis-remembering the name of.
2. The "Here be Dragons" got added later, when the signature of the function didn't change (or it did, but duck-typing, so no-errors, let's go!)
3. I was told about the function verbally, so I never read the docs. I then told someone else. At some point, the oral tradition drops the "Here be Dragons".
4. In a less formal code review (maybe someone in charge of many programmers, who cannot do a full read of all of their code) there is no way to easily have them find it all using grep.

Your solution is really fragile. It requires never changing classes once they are created (at least the public members thereof) because you never know if they are used. Which, in some languages, or with some programmers, is all the members.

Further, the only situation you seem to be able to suggest where it is useful is when you have, I'm assuming read-only, access to two modules, and need to create some code that hacks both of them together. And at least one module declines to use the proper method of defining interfaces and using those.

To get that feature, you're willing to jettison a ton of compile time checking, make the codebase fragile and hard to change.

Honest questions: Have you ever worked on a large codebase? Multiple developer? Multi-year? Cause what you write makes me assume that you, in fact, do not. That your big issues are hacking together two JQuery modules, and you make websites where you're the sole coder.

Regulated utilities provide water, natural gas, trash pickup, and power to the majority of americans already.
Either through a municipal entity (local government workers) or a private company that holds a contract with the municipality.

Either way, if it's behaviour begins to get unruly and you're unable to force their hand through the market (by cutting back usage of the service), you can also slap them down in the voting booth, which is easier to do on the local level.*

(*for now...the Koch's and ALEC are begining to try and buy local elections too)

Of course actual outright bribery...cash for votes...is rare...it's too obvious.
But when a congress critter's campaign (and please dont use that nonsense about PACs not being the same thing...) is majority financed by a particular company in their district, and the critter continually backs anything that benefits that company....what word would you describe it with?

Each of the biggest GW deniers in congress is heavily backed by oil and gas companies.
Each of the biggest military industry supporters is heavily backed by defense contractors.
Etc.
Etc.

The only manure here is your own.

As far as the general public is concerned:
When it's convenient, people use numbers, real or made up, in order to disprove the other sides point and prove their own...
When it's not convenient, all statistics become questionable ("ya, but msot statistics are made up") in order to disprove the other sides point and prove their own...

The reality of the numbers don't matter. People just don't care about actual objective facts, they just want to back up their preconcieved notions to spread their stupidity. It's just like how Americans approach science in general really.

the actual number could be much higher, but go undetected because the user isn't drawing enough current to expose the flaw. or maybe the user just says "damn, what a cruddy power cord" and just grabs another out of his collection.

sounds like cutting corners with narrower gage wire and possibly thinner insulation jacket as well.
i don't know the current draw of the devices in question, but if the wire gage is too thin it will get very hot.
another possibilty is the connection point between the wire and the connectors. it also needs to be of sufficient cross section to tranfer the full current load without overheating.

either way the answer is: cutting corners.

Python does a decent job with multiple inheritance,

Eh, so does C++.

The only time C++ really has trouble is if A and B share the names of methods/variables. And the reason they will have trouble is that there is no solvable way to not have trouble. Not for a computer. Not for a programmer.

Although, I don't see how you can possibly go wrong, if you can write to the module that contains A creating an interface A implements, and changing the code that the module uses to use said interface.. There's no difference for backwards compatibility. (Unless you don't believe in namespaces, and have to worry about truely unique names everywhere.)

"""Here there be dragons, beware"""

See, that's not something that is easy to search for in code reviews. Because, there is no validation that I did not write: *** Off the edge of the world: Sea Serpents Around ***

And if you cannot trust other programmers to use fucking interfaces, you cannot trust them to use the right magic strings.

That's an interesting comparison. Ignoring the question of whether "these guys" are promoting feudalism, I find it interesting to think about which actually is better, Marxism or feudalism, as an economic system.

From an ideological perspective, Marxism is better, in theory at least, because placing all ownership of property in the hands of a few lords is blatantly unfair. From a practical perspective, though, I'm not sure there's a difference, because every attempt to implement Marxism on any scale larger than a small commune ends up putting control of all property in the hands of a few committee members. I don't think there is any real difference between ownership and control that looks just like ownership but isn't.

In both cases, what you have is central planning, normally organized on multiple tiers to address the fact that no one person or committee can understand and manage it all. However, feudal systems tend to create stronger demarcations between the tiers, and very strong separation of control between the fiefs. This allows for the development of a market economy between fiefs, plus whatever internal markets the feudal lords choose to allow. And those who allow greater economic freedom will find their fiefs generating greater wealth, and feudalism is, er, not much constrained by ideological considerations.

I suppose a Marxist nation that organized itself as a collection of small communes who engaged in market transactions between one another could do that as well, but I think the ideology tends to squash that idea, because if communal ownership works at the small scale, why not expand it?

All in all, though neither is a very effective economic structure, I suspect that feudalism would be better than Marxism given comparable levels of technology and education. Marx obviously thought his system would be an improvement, since his whole focus was transitioning from feudalism to the "improved" world of communal ownership. But I think history has proved that he was simply wrong.

I think so, too, and I don't think it's a problem. Rather than just telling people they're talking out of their ass, why don't you explain what value is gained by watching it? Obviously there's no factual information in the video that can't be expressed in a few sentences of text, so the only think I can suppose is that you're of the opinion that the greater emotional impact of seeing it has value.

What, precisely, is that value? For me, personally, I can't imagine what it would be. I don't think anything could make me more strongly opposed to the act of beheading an innocent journalist. Seeing it would make that opposition more visceral -- perhaps in an almost literal sense -- but it wouldn't increase my opposition. It wouldn't lower my opinion of the terrorists, either, since it's not possible to hold a lower opinion of them than I do.

So what is the value of seeing it?

a) there isn't one. the most that can be said is it's a concept misunderstood by deniers who have no clue what they are talking about.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

b) wrong.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-...

c1) wrong. they are NOT naturally absorbed. if they were, the planet would not be warming, leading to ever increasing amounts of stored energy unable to re-radiate out into space. the natural carbon cycle deals out no where near the amount of CO2 humans do. 40 billion tons. That's the YEARLY output of human activity. Imagine the biggest aircraft you can think of...they weigh ~100,000 tons. So now imagine 400,000 of those aircraft carriers. That's the weight of CO2 that we pump into the atmosphere yearly. Alternatively, think of a cubic volume of gas (CO2)....18 miles on each side (that's ~95k feet high...almost to space)...that's also 40 billion tons. And we do that every year. And before you spout some bullshit about volcanoes...no. Volcanic yearly output of the entire planet is only ~3 billion tons of CO2.

c2) the rest of c was pretty stupid, and just frankly not worth it.

And this idiocy still gets modded "insightful" while actual science gets modded "troll".
Stupid fucking mod system.

My mod stalker sure has a lot of points to abuse