I don't get the focus on whether or not the warming is anthropogenic. Should we ignore all problems that we didn't make?

Supposing that the warming isn't primarily anthropogenic, there's still plenty of reason to believe that the greenhouse gases we're adding are making it worse, and in fact we can even make some reasonable estimates of how much worse they're making it.

At the end of the day, you'd really better hope that you're wrong about our ability to modify the climate. Because the current climate of Earth is not typical. In fact, there isn't really a "typical" climate for the planet. Ice core histories show us that it swings between much hotter than it is, and much, much colder (by "colder", think "equatorial oceans frozen 30 feet deep for millenia"). Both extremes will be unpleasant for us, and I say "will", not "would", because it's gonna happen. When? We have no idea. We know that climate changes can happen very rapidly (couple of decades), even without an obvious precipitating event (big meteor, supervolcano eruption, etc.), and that they come at apparently-random intervals.

So if we want this planet to be nice for us long-term, we'd better learn to engineer our climate. Or get even better at adapting our local environment. Or both.

Yep. In the long run, the climate will change no matter what we do... unless we learn to actively manage it. Similarly, we will get hit by a catastrophically-destructive meteor, unless we develop the technology need to identify and deflect dangerous asteroids. It's worth noting that while without our intervention the climate may stay as it is for thousands of years, it may also change in decades. The ice core records tell us that the planet is capable of warming or cooling as much as 7C in as little as 20-30 years, even without any obvious catastrophic event, and even faster given a supervolcano eruption, or a big meteor. It WILL happen.

IMO, while it certainly makes sense to take reasonable steps to limit greenhouse gas production, we really need to focus on investing heavily in climate research, with an eventual goal of learning not only to understand but to manage our planet's climate. Actually, we should also invest a little in more strategies to cope with unpleasant climate. I say "more" strategies, because we already have a lot of them. The regions of Earth in which humans can survive comfortably without technological assistance are really small. The "natural" human carrying capacity of most of the places people live is basically zero, but we're very good at modifying our environment to adapt it to our needs. When the planet warms substantially, no doubt we'll have to apply more of those skills, so we should be thinking about which ones and how to improve our capabilities.

I'd argue that the rule of law is a result of applying the scientific method to social structure and governance.

The scientific method really consists of making conjectures and analyzing them critically. Some of the criticism comes from experimentation and analysis, but most conjectures never reach that point because simple thought can identify reasons they should be discarded. This process is closely related to (but vastly more powerful than) the mutation and selection process of evolution. At bottom, both are about creating and testing ideas, and selecting the ones that are objectively better (for the relevant definition of "better"). The scientific method does the selection through a tradition of criticism, natural evolution does it via replication (favoring the gene that replicates itself better).

How does this apply to the rule of law? Three ways. First of all, applying the same principle of progress to social structure, trying new methods and keeping those which work well while discarding those which don't, will lead to rule of law because it clearly is a superior social structure "technology". Second, without the rule of law, you really can't apply the scientific method to social structures, because there is no defined structure beyond the whim of the ruler(s). You have to fix the rules firmly so you can see what the outcomes are, and you can observe how to vary them. So any attempt to apply scientific reasoning to governance demands rule of law.

Third, and most important, the tradition of criticism inherent in and necessary to scientific progress inevitably leads people to criticize their government and to demand, among other things, the ability to understand the rules by which they're governed. I don't believe it's possible for any society with a significant number of scientific thinkers with any sort of influence to remain governed by fiat.

I think history bolsters my argument, too, simply based on the sequence of events. The Enlightenment was all about scientific reasoning and learning how to apply it to nearly all areas of human endeavor, not just science, and the Enlightenment came before the spread of the rule of law, not after.

Oh, actually I think there's a fourth reason scientific thinking creates the rule of law. It's even deeper, and is probably the truly fundamental reason, though it's a harder argument to make. That is that moral values are scientifically determined (even if we don't realize it), and the rule of law is morally right. It would take me a few pages to detail how and why I think that moral rightness is a real, determinable thing, derivable from the laws of nature, and not merely an artifact of culture, so I won't bother. Note that I'm not arguing that correct morality is easy to derive. It's not, any more than it was easy to derive General Relativity by conjecturing about observations of reality. But it can be derived, and in the same method: by conjecturing moral positions and then criticizing them, both logically and experimentally, discarding positions that lead to undesirable outcomes.

I could as easily pick apart your arguments. I find it hard to imagine never using code that is shared with other projects for example. Why re-invent the wheel? Are you declaring code re-use dead? What about the system libraries? Do you hack those without notice too?

You could move the goalposts like that. I explicitly didn't respond because that is trying to derail the conversation.

But what the hell. You've stopped actually responding to the points I make.

So, I would contend that code reuse is helped, not hampered, by compiler-verified interfaces. I would contend that your "code reuse" is so stifling that it is literally inferior to copy-and-pasting... at least with copy-and-pasted code you can improve the module you copied without worrying that it breaks things.

And what happened to unit testing where you should easily enough shake out cases where people called a function they shouldn't have?

Why do you want to re-invent the wheel. Now, unit testing is good, but using unit testing to re implement (imperfectly) interfaces is, well, crazy.

I have argued that the programmer who just takes the IDE's word for it will eventually end up in deep trouble.

No, you've argued that programmers are perfect, that the comments will always be accurate, functions you call will never change, and the comments always need to be read for every getter and setter. And that's just to reject my examples.

And I categorically reject any of the above.

You seem to be arguing that duck typing is bad because shoddy practices rule.

Since the only example you have been able to give as to why duck-typing has any benefit, is as a patch to shoddy use of interfaces, this seems a remarkably dumb statement. I contend that duck-typing hurts the ability of the computer to detect errors, and your only response is that some people didn't properly use interfaces in legacy code. Not that interfaces are somehow a bad way to program. But a shoddy programmer may not have used them.

Well, fuck that. A paradigm that gives up useful features to paper-over shitty work, or allows code reuse between kinda existent modules via unspecified hack code that works 95% of the time is bad. Heck, any code that would need to be papered over like you suggest probably shouldn't be trusted. Duck typing is bad, it encourages bad practices and bad coding, and allows bad programmers to continue programming with silent errors as opposed to either fixing their shit or quitting their job and flipping burgers.

Cops have the authority and discretion to issue verbal or written warnings instead of citations for moving violations, so video recording won't change that.

And indeed, sometimes the requirement. For instance, in a state that shall remain nameless, the state patrol on drunk driving duty is supposed to pull over people who cannot stay between the lines. They don't bother citing the people who spilled soda in their lap, or were distracted, etc. It's not what their job is. But they do give a formal warning. That way, when their patrol is over, their sergeant can see they weren't asleep, or at a strip club.

you just called whatever the IDE autopopulated with, apparently without bothering to check what it was. Or at least that's what you said may happen.

Right, because you thought that the function was a different one because you misremembered the name. Or because you would assume a function like "getCurrentHealth()" would return the health of a character, and not, I don't know, concatenate two Strings randomly. Especially if that's what similar, or identically named, functions do throughout a library.

But, yeah, it may happen.

And oral lore is really "consulting with collegues" Which totally happens in real situations. If I ask someone, for example, how to get an arctan value outside the -pi/2 to pi/2 range, them explaining quickly how to use atan2f is more valuable than telling me a function name and "GTFO;RTFM".

Bottom line, I'm advocating for computers doing the work instead of comments (which may be unread, or out of date, or literally written after the code that referred to them). I posit many, many, reasons why having a computer check for errors instead of a human being. Your only response is that "Dude, but then I cannot hack two systems together using magic glue that happens to work, and enforces on everyone a requirement of never even optimizing their code, because any change could break my system. And could be avoided if I followed best practices."

When every advantage you suggest can be done in a superior way without using duck typing, I'm blown away. You have argued that perfect programmers don't need the fuckin' IDE, they can check their own work. Well, perfect programmers don't need the fuckin' comments either, they can read the entire code and know what happens.

I can only assume you're trolling, because while I've heard people defend duck-typing before, I've never heard such a malformed argument.

That's a problem. But it's a smaller problem than the one we live with now, which is that there are so many obscure laws that if anyone in a position of authority has it in for you they can find something to nail you for. The rule of law matters.

What an idiot. You kan't reed.

Of course it can be helped. Fix the laws. The application of the bad laws will motivate their correction.

Utter red herring.

The tyrannies to which you refer were fought by amending the federal constitution and enacting appropriate federal laws to curb the abuses. That's a Good Thing, both the process and the outcome. But it has nothing to do with mi's point. The things the federal government manipulates through funding are things that it has no authority to control, and for which there is no national political will sufficient to give the government that control. Hence this back door method.

If cop cameras are sufficiently important that the federal government should mandate them, then Congress should pass a law mandating them. If the courts knock the law down as unconstitutional (as they would), then we should amend the constitution to give the federal government the authority required. This sneaky backdoor manipulation of state policy via federal funding, though... it's a tool that has no essential limits and no constitutional controls. It's a bad idea, and we should stop it.

rule of law back then was "Whatever the Lord of the Manor says, is the law".

Yes. many of them DO get rich through rule of law.
Specifically laws that make it legal to exploit the poor, the underprivilidged, the weak, etc.
Or to pass down billions to their children to keep it in the family, lest anyone ever actually have to "work".

You'll have to remind me how they contribute to society though.

Oh wait I know...this is the one I get told all the time: think of all those poor Walmart worker, who would be jobless if not for Walmart. Why, they're doing them a favor by even hiring them. Therefore the Waltons and Walmart deserve every dime they get by exploiting the social safety that keeps their workers from dying and starving homeless in the street cause their job doesn't pay them enough to prevent from being homeless.

Here we go. a giant list.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/wik...

The Discovery Institute... has nothing to d with science and everything to do with undermining it.
The American Family Association ...
The Family Research Council ...
Family Values ...
(Basically anything family has nothing to do with actual caring families, and everythng to do with opposing LGBT rights)
Heritage...
Enterprise...
Freedom...
ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) ...

Why so many misnomers over on that side?

If inches were truly still based on someone's thumb, while meters are not, you would have a point.
But since all measures are tied back to standards internationally agreed upon to be the one true Measure of X, you have no valid point.
Conversion factors aren't hard.

I presume you use the old cut'n'past code 'sharing' method with a significant appearance of the cargo cult antipattern?

Clearly the only reason you would say something like that is a particularly stupid ad homenim. I'm talking about using interfaces and code review. I'm talking about best design practices. Clearly, since I'm advocating for using interfaces, I'm not copy-and-pasting code. But advocating for what you are advocating for is actually really compatible with cut-and-pasted-code.

But that level of intentional misunderstanding may bleed into my responses below.

If any of that happens, you absolutely positively deserve everything you get. DO NOT call a function if you don't know what it is!

At this point, I wonder how your "everything in comments" system architecture works, since you seem to have issues reading. I mean, nothing I wrote says "call functions randomly".

I talked about an obvious human error (incorrect memory of a name); I talked about being given information from a collegue; I talked about coordination issues where function signatures changed; and I talked about how hard it made code reviews.

The fact that you don't seem to recognize these possible issue makes me question your experience. Because these are all things that happen.

Surely you don't recommend unilaterally changing code used in other projects!

I'm not going to make an argument here, because this is obviously going to lead to a conversation derailing where you don't address my valid points above.