Then I thought, well perhaps designer spends years designing a game with all sorts of clever ideas then copiers use them all a few days after release. I have to ask, though, is this what happens?

What happens is that the developer has dozens of ideas, and the 30th one actually works. People like it; people play it. It has the right "stuff" that it becomes a success. Finding that combination is what takes years. Actually producing that one game may have only taken the amount of time it takes a copier.

Although tuning very well also takes a lot of time.

Surely a game must spend some time before becoming popular enough to copy, during which it builds a following and has first mover advantage. Copiers can't copy those advantages

Well, I mean, Candy Crush is a cheap knockoff. Sometimes, marketing muscle beats out organic growth. Hell, Zynga used to threaten (and follow through on threats to) to just clone games if they would not sell, and then popularize the Zynga version through their marketing. They then would crush the original.

Hell, there are lists, both in games and in the world, where people think that the original is a cheap knockoff.

My favorite example is Hydrox vs. Oreo, but numerous others exist.

You can also cast things around until the compiler and IDE buy it and wait for the SEGV.

You can do a lot of things. But having a code that says "danger, this code requires a lot of care to touch." is a good thing. Casting things through a void* or something like that is an excellent example of how you can detect that when reviewing or working on code. Plus, that's the exception. So when I see a void*, I know that the documentation is really important.

It's on the developer to know when they can and cannot get away with it.

I don't understand why. Fundamentally, it seems superior to have a computer check for bugs for you. That's what static code analysis is all about.

If you don't KNOW if class A and Bs X methods are actually compatible, what in the hell are you doing passing them around? You're supposed to know that.

Because I'm human, and made a mistake? Because when I wrote the code they were compatible, but then someone changed the definitions of one of the classes without knowing it would break my assumed usage because they weren't aware of everywhere that the code would be used in the entire codebase. Because there are multiple developers on a project?

This would be a lot less of an issue if multiple inheritance was better supported, but it's not.If it was, I could write the module explicitly around class A. Later, given a class B that should work fine with the module, I could derive Bprime inheriting from A and B and it would be fine.

But it actually is pretty well supported, especially in this case. I mean, actual multiple inheritance is always a shitshow. But interfaces are totally well supported and easy to use. I don't understand what issues you think arise from using interfaces. But I can say that what you describe is pretty much what should happen. Although really you should write the module around Aprime, an interface, and then say that both A and B implement interface Aprime.

Duck typing is a mixed bag.

Curious, let's see how.

You can make the requirements clearer in comments and the doc string.

I suppose that's the admitted disadvantage? That I can type more to have limitations enforced by humans instead of machines.

t also has great advantages in being more concerned with attributes than declared type or lineage. It allows modules to deal with classes that weren't even imagined when they were written.

You mean like interfaces would let you do?

Pascal was a good choice of learning language. Now that OOP has proven out, Java is a good choice. Stay away from the rest until you're competent in one of those two.

If you don't start out dealing with hand-managed memory, you don't learn how memory works. Which means you do stupid shit later.

n many sites you'll be met with messages such as: We've noticed that you have an Ad Blocker, as we're depending on advertisement revenue to provide you with free services - we will kindly ask you to turn your Ad Blocker off and reload the page to see your content.

I don't think I've ever seen that message.

And we could still have e-comerce on the web, we could still use sites like Amazon rather than having to drive miles to get to a limited selection and pay higher prices at a local "friendly" bookstore. But somehow there would be no advertising.

The idea that Amazon, or any of e-commerce, would disappear in the absence of ads on the web is really really strange. Do you know that Amazon makes their money off selling things and content, not ads? They buy goods for lower prices then they sell them, and make money on a "markup". And the same is true of all e-commerce sites?

Like, eBay takes a cut of transactions. It doesn't show ads.

Why wouldn't Google exist (as a search engine) without advertising. I mean, they made the engine, and monetized it later. Lacking ads, they could probably get by just fine ala Wikipedia.

Every US citizen is yelling for their constitutional rights broken by the NSA. But no Europeans complain about what the NSA is doing to THEM.

Well, that would be counterproductive. See, we get upset when the NSA spies on us But we love when the NSA spies on not us. The best strategy for EU residents is to shut up an hope we go too far in shutting down the spying.

I mean, I pay the NSA to spy on not us. That's their fucking job.

Well, they've been working to replace Foxconn workers with robots. Presumably, once enough of the line is automated, they'll rip it out of china and move it to somewhere cheaper

Most student loans will cover unpaid internships.

Also, yeah it sucks, but what's the pragmatic solution. Financially well-off parents means better childhood health and better education, almost certainly leading to a better qualified future candidate. All other things being equal.

who does the best work. If you don't think this is true, ask yourself whether you'd rather have a semi-competent pilot flying your airliner because the airline was forced to accept hiring quotas, or whether you'd rather have the very best pilot available controlling the airliner on which you are a passenger.

Competent is fine by me. I don't care if they are Charles Lindburgh reincarnated or just some guy who can keep it, metaphorically, between the lines. In fact, I'd rather the pilot was cheaper and the savings passed on to me. (Which also seems to be what the airlines have done)

Now, unqualified/incompetent is a different matter. But, not the best does not imply unqualified.

"Doability" isn't. How long you look at the post is. So, FB figured out your preferred use of their service is to look at small pictures of attractive women.

Facebook isnt interested in you as a person, theyre interested in you as a product.

Why would it be otherwise?

Ethically: Because someone read Kant.

Financially: Because it will likely lead to a longer lived network, that makes more money over 90+ years, but less money in the first decade.

happy people pay more attention to ads(citation available if anyone cares)

Please. It seems logical, but I'd like to see some data.

Are you proposing that all of physics is untestable because we don't know how to test it inside of a black hole?

Yes. I'm saying the the total set of all physics is currently (and likely to remain) untestable. Which isn't to say that science cannot handle it. We use principles like Occum's Razor to say that if it is the best description of what we can observe, then we assume (pending further disproving) it is true.

Which works out great. I mean, "truth" is a nebulous concept. One can construct a universal coordinate system that treats the earth as the unmoving center, and has the sun moving around it in strange shapes. And, in fact, that's the coordinate system we use through most of our daily life (folks at NASA, SpaceX, etc. excluded). But we recognize when it becomes more convenient to have a different truth. Also, similar to how I've never concerned myself (outside of class) with relativity, but GPS engineers had to.

Heck, even relativity wasn't testable when postulated. It took like 40 years to conceive of a test.

So I suppose my entire point was against the unreasonable goal of testability for all facts.