We're all nerds here. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend God is a programmer, and his language is DNA. When you remember that some segments of DNA control multiple features in the finished program (your body), you can then realise that it is conceivable that the "best" way to make us the way we are is to include a "remnant" of a tail.
What I'm getting at is that we have no idea what DNA changes would be necessary to remove the tailbone. Perhaps removing the tailbone would change the DNA sequences such that a vital organ fails. Perhaps it would lower our resistance to UV rays, or hamper our vision, or one of a bazillion other possibilities.
Another way to look at it is this - if you were a programmer, writing thousands of similar programs, wouldn't you use a common base for all of them? We take the "animal" template, add in some features and tweaks, and suddenly you have a cat. Take that same "animal" template, add in some different features and tweaks, and suddenly you have a man.
I have no opinion on whether it actually happened that way or not. I'm religious, but it doesn't really matter to me *how* God created everything. As far as I'm concerned, God could have simply arranged things such that evolution would happen on its own in exactly the way he intended. Or, he could be a cosmic prankster, leaving these clues behind so that we'd go on these wild goose chases.
Point is, it's not really relevant, but it's fun to think about:)
Unless you have proof that there is no God, you're in no position to tell someone else that they're wrong to believe in God - you can only say that you believe they're wrong.
It's fine that you don't believe in God, but don't presume to elevate your personal beliefs to the level of fact, when in truth you have no more evidence against the existence of God than anyone else has in favor of it.
Quite the opposite - any Christian who believes the New Testament has absolutely no reason to fear death, while at the same time having absolutely no reason to fear anything that might happen in life.
Sure, some churches (and I won't name names) try to hide it, and they do prey on fear of death. But many don't, and it's not really fair of you to generalize on *that* point.
Belief in intelligent design is not incompatible with evolution in and of itself (though there are some other Christian beliefs which are incompatible). However, requiring students to go out trolling in "defense" of the belief is unhelpful in every way, for everyone involved - it teaches students to troll, instead of have intelligent discussions, and that on a topic that can be neither proved nor disproved.
This teacher would be hard-pressed to find an example of Christ behaving in this manner...
Seeing as there's this thing called innocent until proven guilty the burden is on you not me to prove the justice system has to have more power.
I haven't said anything about how it needs more power, I'm just saying that the existing system is good enough. You're the one that wants to change it somehow so that it gets fewer false positives.
The power to require ID, "papers please", and to track citizens to start with.
Except in a very few specific cases, the government does not have that power, nor would I suggest we give the government that power. But seeing as how we've been talking about the justice system, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
Mods, if you disagree with me, then "-1 Overrated" is the proper mod, not "-1 Troll". I'm clearly not trolling. Mentioning a potential afterlife is not automatically a troll.
What same powers? The power to hold jury trials? No, I wouldn't have a problem with that. The power to put convicted people in jail? No, I don't have a problem with that.
How about you present an alternative to our current justice system which gets a smaller false positive rate while maintaining a low false negative rate. If you can come up with one that works, then I'll believe that your complaints aren't just whining.
In the meantime, I'll stand by our justice system as it is; I can't think of a better way to determine criminal responsibility.
Would you please point out where in the Constitution it says the federal government can build dams, fund road construction, and so forth?
There are a lot of things the federal government does that aren't explicitly allowed by the Constitution (but which are not disallowed). If you want to limit the government in that way, we're going to have a very powerless government.
You know... I really think you're making a bigger deal out of this than it is. Or do you have a reliable way to determine the false positive conviction rate?
That's alright by me, I've said for years we should have a citizens military [powells.com] with a small core of professionals. We don't need a military as big as we have, or one spread all over the world.
There is no such thing as a military which has the ability to protect everyone on a block except Steve Jones who refuses to pay - it either protects the block or it does not. (Remember, we're not talking about defense against gangs or mobs, we're talking about defense against another country.) That's why it's a tax-funded service - it's the only way to ensure that everyone who is covered is paying.
And other economists who put as much if not more thought into it opposed the bailouts.
That's true. But how do us laypeople - who do not have extensive training in economics - know who to believe? I cannot fault Bush or Obama for listening to their staff economists, regardless of the economists' conclusions, because their qualifications are just as good as all the opposing economists.
"Group B opposes group A" is not a sufficient reason to ignore group A.
No, that tells me government has gotten too big and exists outside the limits put on it by the Constitution of the USA. Fine, if you want government to do something it does not have the power to do, propose an amendment, don't treat the Constitution as toilet paper.
If you knew anything about me you'd know that I'm quite vocal in my defense of the Constitution as written. I don't see anything unconstitutional about bailing out banks (given sufficient oversight) - especially where a lot of very qualified economists think that not doing so would do significant damage to the economy.
How, exactly, is it outside of the government's power to provide loans to banks so that they don't collapse and destroy the economy? The government can loan money to whomever it pleases, as far as the Constitution is concerned. (These bailouts are not free cash handouts, despite what the media wants you to think.)
Sure, by your logic, you're *forced* to eat. You're *forced* to sleep. That's not the case - you choose to eat and sleep, knowing what the consequences are if you do not.
The fact of the matter is, you do have a choice - you can pay taxes, or you can not pay taxes. Claim you have no taxable income - there, you pay no taxes. Sure, you might be lying to the IRS - but if you're unwilling to obey tax laws, why should a little thing like lying make you squeamish?
Remember, in life, we usually get to choose our actions, but we almost never get to choose the consequences of our actions. In this case, we can even choose to avoid the situation entirely - if you don't want to pay taxes and you don't want to go to jail, leave the country. There, problem solved.
Mitigating factor - I believe in an afterlife. As long as I didn't actually commit the crime, then in the grand scheme of things the time spent in prison - or even the wrongful execution - becomes quite irrelevant. The important thing is how I behaved myself during that time.
If we refuse to prosecute cases because we might make a mistake, we'll never prosecute anyone except where we have clear HD video footage of the defense committing the crime. That's a direction I would prefer we avoid.
So no, I would not believe it's better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. (In fact I'm quite sure the false positive rate is much, much smaller. Try not to misrepresent it as 1 in 11, ok?)
We live in an imperfect world. People hold grudges. People's memories are warped by time, lack of sleep, emotions, alcohol, and so on. In such a world, it would be impossible to design a system that has zero false positives. I am willing to allow a tiny false positive rate rather than allow a large false negative rate - and if the event arises that I am falsely convicted, I will maintain that stance.
I wouldn't do so well in the army, what with the scrawniness and nerdiness... but I applaud you for enlisting. I pay my taxes, though, in part because I support the military.
I guess my opinion mostly comes from the "I'm not doing anything right now that could benefit from reflection, so obviously C++ doesn't really need it." That's probably not the best reason...
If C++ had reflection, you could write a "callMethod()" function in "a"'s class, pass it "foo" as a string, and just use reflection to call it.
That's not particularly difficult to fake, if you're willing to do a little maintenance. Make a map of std::string to function pointers, mapping the scriptable function name to the object's member function. boost::bind lets you do this pretty easily; I've used it to write a generic context menu class (wrapping MFC's insane menu API).
This has the added benefit of preventing people from calling functions on that class that you don't want them to call - using reflection, they could in theory call any member function of the class, regardless of whether it's part of your scripting API, unless you explicitly filter for it in your callMethod function.
If you're going to maintain a set of allowed (or disallowed) functions anyway, I'd personally choose to maintain the permitted list rather than the non-permitted list, to avoid mishaps.
Of course, if your functions take different numbers and/or types of arguments, you might have to handle each individual function separately anyway, making the whole reflection thing moot.
Bottom line is, I don't think reflection would really add anything to the language that you couldn't fake with some ugly and/or elegant code (at least as far as your example goes).
Because duck typing can lead to weird and inconvenient bugs that are nearly impossible to detect.
More to the point, Python's duck typing is broken. Nobody should have to spend five hours tracking down a bug specifically caused because Python can't figure out that when I tell it to write an integer and I give it a string, it should treat the string as an integer (and before you all say "the string must not have had a number in it", the string was nothing but "10", as I confirmed when I figured out the cause of the bug).
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting with my Recovering Python Programmers support group.
Prosecution of accused criminals is a service, yes; it's irrelevant that you happen to be the accused in this case.
The reason I say it's irrelevant is that there's no feasible way to separate "paying taxes to prosecute accused criminals" from "paying taxes to prosecute accused criminals who aren't yourself".
Even if you wanted to split every single taxpayer's money into individual accounts, it wouldn't make a whit of difference - if your tax contributions were excluded from being used to prosecute you, they would be no less able to prosecute you, because they could just use your money to prosecute someone else and use that other person's money to prosecute you.
Trouble is, when given the choice, the vast majority of people would choose to not pay for military support, thinking "everyone else is paying for it, it won't matter if I don't". Suddenly the military has no funding.
You can't provide a costly service that covers everyone - military protection - and then just ask nicely for contributions. It doesn't work in the real world. The military can't not protect you if you don't pay - if you live within the borders of the country, the military is protecting you, period.
The same goes for other covers-everyone services. You can't let people pick and choose whether they're going to pay for services that are going to benefit them whether or not they pay, because inevitably the vast majority will choose not to pay.
(Incidentally, this was covered in Economics 101. You may want to re-take that class...)
I do not, on the other hand, want to pay for bank bailouts and special interest pork barrel projects.
You have two options, then: vote for people who will stop those things from happening, or run for office yourself. That's how this country is run.
You may not have wanted to pay for bank bailouts, but I really don't want to experience several banks collapsing at once. Bank runs don't make for stable economies. I suspect you're not an economist - a lot of economists put a lot of thought into what the government is doing, and a lot of them think it was the best course of action.
A lot of us citizens don't necessarily mind bailing out the banks (given sufficient oversight), but like I said, if you don't like it, you can always vote for someone who shares your views. (You're about to complain that such a person would never get elected. Shouldn't that tell you something about the views of the majority of Americans?)
Great - then, if you can show that the trip downtown cost you money in lost work or something similar, you can sue the department for legal expense plus your lost money.
Cops can't just take you downtown because they feel like it, then get off scot-free even though the whole trip was against the law.
Or rather, they *do* get away with it, because people don't stand up for themselves, but they *shouldn't*.
I'm not much a fan of the "sue everyone who looks at you funny"-mania that America seems prone to these days, but where Cops breaking laws are concerned I'd make an exception.
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We're all nerds here. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend God is a programmer, and his language is DNA. When you remember that some segments of DNA control multiple features in the finished program (your body), you can then realise that it is conceivable that the "best" way to make us the way we are is to include a "remnant" of a tail.
What I'm getting at is that we have no idea what DNA changes would be necessary to remove the tailbone. Perhaps removing the tailbone would change the DNA sequences such that a vital organ fails. Perhaps it would lower our resistance to UV rays, or hamper our vision, or one of a bazillion other possibilities.
Another way to look at it is this - if you were a programmer, writing thousands of similar programs, wouldn't you use a common base for all of them? We take the "animal" template, add in some features and tweaks, and suddenly you have a cat. Take that same "animal" template, add in some different features and tweaks, and suddenly you have a man.
I have no opinion on whether it actually happened that way or not. I'm religious, but it doesn't really matter to me *how* God created everything. As far as I'm concerned, God could have simply arranged things such that evolution would happen on its own in exactly the way he intended. Or, he could be a cosmic prankster, leaving these clues behind so that we'd go on these wild goose chases.
Point is, it's not really relevant, but it's fun to think about :)
Unless you have proof that there is no God, you're in no position to tell someone else that they're wrong to believe in God - you can only say that you believe they're wrong.
It's fine that you don't believe in God, but don't presume to elevate your personal beliefs to the level of fact, when in truth you have no more evidence against the existence of God than anyone else has in favor of it.
Religion preys on the fear of life and death.
Quite the opposite - any Christian who believes the New Testament has absolutely no reason to fear death, while at the same time having absolutely no reason to fear anything that might happen in life.
Sure, some churches (and I won't name names) try to hide it, and they do prey on fear of death. But many don't, and it's not really fair of you to generalize on *that* point.
Belief in intelligent design is not incompatible with evolution in and of itself (though there are some other Christian beliefs which are incompatible). However, requiring students to go out trolling in "defense" of the belief is unhelpful in every way, for everyone involved - it teaches students to troll, instead of have intelligent discussions, and that on a topic that can be neither proved nor disproved.
This teacher would be hard-pressed to find an example of Christ behaving in this manner...
Maybe the solution is to elect men who aren't corrupt? Or better, actually weed out corruption! What a novel idea...
Seeing as there's this thing called innocent until proven guilty the burden is on you not me to prove the justice system has to have more power.
I haven't said anything about how it needs more power, I'm just saying that the existing system is good enough. You're the one that wants to change it somehow so that it gets fewer false positives.
The power to require ID, "papers please", and to track citizens to start with.
Except in a very few specific cases, the government does not have that power, nor would I suggest we give the government that power. But seeing as how we've been talking about the justice system, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
Mods, if you disagree with me, then "-1 Overrated" is the proper mod, not "-1 Troll". I'm clearly not trolling. Mentioning a potential afterlife is not automatically a troll.
What same powers? The power to hold jury trials? No, I wouldn't have a problem with that. The power to put convicted people in jail? No, I don't have a problem with that.
How about you present an alternative to our current justice system which gets a smaller false positive rate while maintaining a low false negative rate. If you can come up with one that works, then I'll believe that your complaints aren't just whining.
In the meantime, I'll stand by our justice system as it is; I can't think of a better way to determine criminal responsibility.
Would you please point out where in the Constitution it says the federal government can build dams, fund road construction, and so forth?
There are a lot of things the federal government does that aren't explicitly allowed by the Constitution (but which are not disallowed). If you want to limit the government in that way, we're going to have a very powerless government.
Oh no... I'm not that kind of nerd.
I'm more the kind that studied Quenya for fun, since I had already finished the next ten programming assignments...
The kind that has read the Wheel of Time series four times... ... that kind.
You know... I really think you're making a bigger deal out of this than it is. Or do you have a reliable way to determine the false positive conviction rate?
You know... you can request a takeover of defunct Sourceforge projects...
That's alright by me, I've said for years we should have a citizens military [powells.com] with a small core of professionals. We don't need a military as big as we have, or one spread all over the world.
There is no such thing as a military which has the ability to protect everyone on a block except Steve Jones who refuses to pay - it either protects the block or it does not. (Remember, we're not talking about defense against gangs or mobs, we're talking about defense against another country.) That's why it's a tax-funded service - it's the only way to ensure that everyone who is covered is paying.
And other economists who put as much if not more thought into it opposed the bailouts.
That's true. But how do us laypeople - who do not have extensive training in economics - know who to believe? I cannot fault Bush or Obama for listening to their staff economists, regardless of the economists' conclusions, because their qualifications are just as good as all the opposing economists.
"Group B opposes group A" is not a sufficient reason to ignore group A.
No, that tells me government has gotten too big and exists outside the limits put on it by the Constitution of the USA. Fine, if you want government to do something it does not have the power to do, propose an amendment, don't treat the Constitution as toilet paper.
If you knew anything about me you'd know that I'm quite vocal in my defense of the Constitution as written. I don't see anything unconstitutional about bailing out banks (given sufficient oversight) - especially where a lot of very qualified economists think that not doing so would do significant damage to the economy.
How, exactly, is it outside of the government's power to provide loans to banks so that they don't collapse and destroy the economy? The government can loan money to whomever it pleases, as far as the Constitution is concerned. (These bailouts are not free cash handouts, despite what the media wants you to think.)
Sure, by your logic, you're *forced* to eat. You're *forced* to sleep. That's not the case - you choose to eat and sleep, knowing what the consequences are if you do not.
The fact of the matter is, you do have a choice - you can pay taxes, or you can not pay taxes. Claim you have no taxable income - there, you pay no taxes. Sure, you might be lying to the IRS - but if you're unwilling to obey tax laws, why should a little thing like lying make you squeamish?
Remember, in life, we usually get to choose our actions, but we almost never get to choose the consequences of our actions. In this case, we can even choose to avoid the situation entirely - if you don't want to pay taxes and you don't want to go to jail, leave the country. There, problem solved.
Mitigating factor - I believe in an afterlife. As long as I didn't actually commit the crime, then in the grand scheme of things the time spent in prison - or even the wrongful execution - becomes quite irrelevant. The important thing is how I behaved myself during that time.
If we refuse to prosecute cases because we might make a mistake, we'll never prosecute anyone except where we have clear HD video footage of the defense committing the crime. That's a direction I would prefer we avoid.
So no, I would not believe it's better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. (In fact I'm quite sure the false positive rate is much, much smaller. Try not to misrepresent it as 1 in 11, ok?)
We live in an imperfect world. People hold grudges. People's memories are warped by time, lack of sleep, emotions, alcohol, and so on. In such a world, it would be impossible to design a system that has zero false positives. I am willing to allow a tiny false positive rate rather than allow a large false negative rate - and if the event arises that I am falsely convicted, I will maintain that stance.
I was 6 foot and weighed 165 pounds.
I'm 6 feet tall as well, but I only weigh 135. I win :P
I wouldn't do so well in the army, what with the scrawniness and nerdiness... but I applaud you for enlisting. I pay my taxes, though, in part because I support the military.
Yeah... you're probably right.
I guess my opinion mostly comes from the "I'm not doing anything right now that could benefit from reflection, so obviously C++ doesn't really need it." That's probably not the best reason...
If C++ had reflection, you could write a "callMethod()" function in "a"'s class, pass it "foo" as a string, and just use reflection to call it.
That's not particularly difficult to fake, if you're willing to do a little maintenance. Make a map of std::string to function pointers, mapping the scriptable function name to the object's member function. boost::bind lets you do this pretty easily; I've used it to write a generic context menu class (wrapping MFC's insane menu API).
This has the added benefit of preventing people from calling functions on that class that you don't want them to call - using reflection, they could in theory call any member function of the class, regardless of whether it's part of your scripting API, unless you explicitly filter for it in your callMethod function.
If you're going to maintain a set of allowed (or disallowed) functions anyway, I'd personally choose to maintain the permitted list rather than the non-permitted list, to avoid mishaps.
Of course, if your functions take different numbers and/or types of arguments, you might have to handle each individual function separately anyway, making the whole reflection thing moot.
Bottom line is, I don't think reflection would really add anything to the language that you couldn't fake with some ugly and/or elegant code (at least as far as your example goes).
Because duck typing can lead to weird and inconvenient bugs that are nearly impossible to detect.
More to the point, Python's duck typing is broken. Nobody should have to spend five hours tracking down a bug specifically caused because Python can't figure out that when I tell it to write an integer and I give it a string, it should treat the string as an integer (and before you all say "the string must not have had a number in it", the string was nothing but "10", as I confirmed when I figured out the cause of the bug).
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting with my Recovering Python Programmers support group.
I haven't said anything about offensive wars. I've been speaking strictly of military protection - that is, military in a defensive capacity.
Prosecution of accused criminals is a service, yes; it's irrelevant that you happen to be the accused in this case.
The reason I say it's irrelevant is that there's no feasible way to separate "paying taxes to prosecute accused criminals" from "paying taxes to prosecute accused criminals who aren't yourself".
Even if you wanted to split every single taxpayer's money into individual accounts, it wouldn't make a whit of difference - if your tax contributions were excluded from being used to prosecute you, they would be no less able to prosecute you, because they could just use your money to prosecute someone else and use that other person's money to prosecute you.
Can't please everyone ;)
Trouble is, when given the choice, the vast majority of people would choose to not pay for military support, thinking "everyone else is paying for it, it won't matter if I don't". Suddenly the military has no funding.
You can't provide a costly service that covers everyone - military protection - and then just ask nicely for contributions. It doesn't work in the real world. The military can't not protect you if you don't pay - if you live within the borders of the country, the military is protecting you, period.
The same goes for other covers-everyone services. You can't let people pick and choose whether they're going to pay for services that are going to benefit them whether or not they pay, because inevitably the vast majority will choose not to pay.
(Incidentally, this was covered in Economics 101. You may want to re-take that class...)
I do not, on the other hand, want to pay for bank bailouts and special interest pork barrel projects.
You have two options, then: vote for people who will stop those things from happening, or run for office yourself. That's how this country is run.
You may not have wanted to pay for bank bailouts, but I really don't want to experience several banks collapsing at once. Bank runs don't make for stable economies. I suspect you're not an economist - a lot of economists put a lot of thought into what the government is doing, and a lot of them think it was the best course of action.
A lot of us citizens don't necessarily mind bailing out the banks (given sufficient oversight), but like I said, if you don't like it, you can always vote for someone who shares your views. (You're about to complain that such a person would never get elected. Shouldn't that tell you something about the views of the majority of Americans?)
Because we don't have national ID cards yet, and that's what the topic is about. None of the things you mentioned require any sort of national ID.
Great - then, if you can show that the trip downtown cost you money in lost work or something similar, you can sue the department for legal expense plus your lost money.
Cops can't just take you downtown because they feel like it, then get off scot-free even though the whole trip was against the law.
Or rather, they *do* get away with it, because people don't stand up for themselves, but they *shouldn't*.
I'm not much a fan of the "sue everyone who looks at you funny"-mania that America seems prone to these days, but where Cops breaking laws are concerned I'd make an exception.