Don't you think there's a little something wrong with a programming language that a l337 d00d like yourself, after over a decade, can only use the majority of (which, for all we know, is 50% plus epsilon) safely, effectively, and efficiently?
No, I don't think there's anything wrong with the programming language. A surgeon spends a decade learning how to be safe and effective with a scalpel; does that mean there's something wrong with medicine?
Judging a programming language by only one metric--how long it takes to learn--is foolish. Programming languages need to be judged by more metrics than that.
For instance, ease of programming; C++ is a very easy language to program in, once you understand it. (The learning curve is steeper than the Matterhorn, but once you climb the learning curve, the language's ease is amazing.)
Or raw power. In skilled hands, C++ gives cleaner and tighter code than C. As a real quick example of this, compare C++'s sort algorithm against C's qsort. The C++ sort uses a slower algorithm (most implementations use either an introsort or a tuned mergesort) and yet it routinely comes in 250% faster than C's qsort. Why? Because of aggressive code inlining and the way C++ doesn't need multiple sets of (slow) function pointers to do the comparisons.
Or flexibility. In C, you only have one way to solve a problem--procedurally. (Anyone who tells me they can write object-oriented code in C will be summarily beaten. You can shove a rocket motor up a pig's ass, but that doesn't mean I'm going to smile and happily say the pig is now capable of independent flight.) In C++, you've got access to procedural, object-oriented, functional and generic paradigms, and I've even seen declarative logic done without an excessive amount of work. Now, it's true that C++'s implementation of some of these paradigms is weaker than in some languages specifically devoted to those paradigms--for instance, C++'s object model is less elegant than Objective C's or Smalltalk's, and C++'s functional code is less elegant than LISP's or SML's--but C++ supports plenty enough of those paradigms to be able to do some seriously heavy lifting in all of them. What's the usefulness of the multiple paradigms? Simply this: some problems are easier to solve when thinking of them in one way than they are when thinking of them in another. By being a pervasively multiparadigmatic language, C++ lets you mix and match from different styles of problem-solving at will, in order to best accomplish the task at hand. (As an example, I've asked undergrads to write me the Sieve of Eratosthenes in C... then I show them how purely-functional LISP can beat C's performance... and then I show them how purely-functional C++ even beats LISP's performance.)
Now, all that's a whole farking lot of major goodness. All that's incredible goodness, not to put too fine a point on it. And against this incredible goodness, you have one major, critical flaw:
Optimistically, it'll take you five years to hit this point. More if you have to learn by yourself without any mentors around, because then practically the only way you have to learn about C++'s sharp corners is by running into them.
But on the other hand, in the last few years some truly excellent C++ textbooks have come out--Scott Meyer's Effective C++, More Effective C++ and Effective STL, Koenig and Moo's Accelerated C++, Alandrescu's Modern C++ Design, Plauger, Stepanov and Lee's The C++ Standard Template Library, Josutti's The C++ Standard Library... none of these excellent tomes existed when I was learning C++. It's only since the draft standard became finalized that we really began to see the textbooks we need.
Is C++ worth learning? Absolutely. The payoff to you, the programmer, is immense. Is C++ easy to learn? No. Learning curve like the Matterhorn. Should C++ supplant other programming languages? No. When I don't need C++'s raw power, I use Java, C# or Python.
But when the chips are down and I need to crunch numbers like nobody's business... that's when I reach for C++.
I spent plenty of time in the industry, thank you. Now I'm back in school for an M.Sc. as a career move, not as a shift to an academic career.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to pursue advanced degrees that have nothing to do with committing to academia. One of them happens to be "so that I can get a better job and out of the programming ghetto".
I don't know of many professors who have delivered projects that consisted anywhere close to 100KLOC.
But if you're not in academia, how many professors do you know and do you know them well enough to know their professional resumes? I know three professors who've delivered large projects for industry, and that's just in a fairly small department at one school. (Heck, my advisor still continues to hack on a 10KLOC LISP library that he maintains by himself.)
Your boss is right, and it sucks, and I wish it could be otherwise. Unfortunately, reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
I'm a graduate student. As such, I see a lot of code both from students and from professors. The students have an excuse for lousy code. The professors don't.
In one of the undergraduate CompSci courses, a professor asked on an exam a Java question which could not be answered correctly. If you didn't know Java very well, you'd give an answer which, at first blush, you'd think would work fine, but would have all manner of subtle problems later on down the road. If you knew Java well enough to use a different technique and avoid these subtle problems, you got zero credit for it because you didn't demonstrate any knowledge of how to use the techniques which were being tested on the exam.
I'm not making this stuff up. This stuff is far from unusual; in any reasonably large department there's going to be someone who's too incompetent to ever get anywhere in the research side of things, so where do they wind up? Teaching undergraduate courses instead. The best minds cloister themselves in research and graduate classes; the worst minds get to teach the next generation.
So what happens when these undergrads leave school and go into the real world? Well, if they're talented, smart and willing to work like hell, they'll spend the next five or six years mastering languages and techniques and getting painful lessons from bitter experience. On the other hand, 90% of them say <Keanu> "I know Java-Fu." </Keanu> And they don't, and they can't be persuaded that they don't. Because after all, they have a Bachelor's degree, right? That means they know this stuff, right?
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years actively engaged in learning, in developing new skills, in finding interesting corners and how-to-do-weird-things, is a gift from the Almighty. Treasure these people. They are rare.
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years doing the same sorts of problems the same way over and over and over again is eleven years past their sell-by date.
There are a lot more of the latter than the former.
Pre-Y2K I was hired by a major telecommunications company. I soon found myself an unofficial liaison to the UNIX development group, because being a recent college grad I understood modern C++. The UNIX development group had a lot of programmers, some who'd started using C++ in 1983... and none of them had kept abreast of the ever-evolving C++ spec past '93. That meant that when we got an updated C++ compiler that was stricter and more standards-conformant, half their code immediately crapped out all over the place, and I got dragged over to the UNIX dev group to walk them through modernizing their code.
So imagine that you're the manager of the UNIX dev group. What you see are a bunch of old graybeards with 20+ years of software experience (and salaries to match!), who are relying on a twentysomething not six months out of college to tell them how to make their code compile.
What would you as the manager think? Would you think "damn, that kid must be really hot!", or would you think "damn, experience in programming is really overrated!"?
Now, these guys who didn't know beans about modern C++ knew every single bug, quirk and weirdness in the phone system. They were walking Bugzillas for phreaking, fraud and mayhem. They knew every RS-6000, they knew every weirdness of our systems. But once outside the very narrow domain of our systems, they were completely out of their depth. They were essentially unemployable as programmers given how dated their programming knowledge was.
There are a lot of guys like that out there. They far outnumber the hardcore geeks who never stop learning and who pride themselves on always staying current.
You agreed with the person who did state that, without actually restating it yourself.
No, I demonstrated the existence of a Constitutional right to travel, which someone (foolishly) disputed. (Ironically, the person who disputed this was the same person who argued there was a Constitutional right to drive...) Read the entire thread. At any rate, I'm done.
Congress has no right to prevent you from doing this. None at all. Where's the problem?
The State, on the other hand, does have the right to tell you "you can't deliberately kill someone who's not threatening your life". And in this case, that's exactly what the State does.
Please learn about the Federal-State distinction.
And incidentally, if you'd have actually read my prior posts, you'd have discovered I wasn't the one advocating "the right to do X" does not mean "the right to do X by any means I choose".
You seem to be operating under a critical misunderstanding of how this country works. I don't need to cite the Constitution to show that I have a right; you have to be able to cite the Constitution to show that Congress has a certain power! (Article I, Sec. 8, Clauses 1-18 are an exhaustive listing of the sorts and categories of national laws Congress may enact. You may want to look there first.)
"Regulating travel among the several States" is not listed anywhere in the Constitution under the powers reserved to the government. As such, under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, that right explicitly falls to the State and the individual. This has been upheld in Crandell v Nevada and Edwards v California, both of which were attempts to enforce direct restrictions on travel. Both were savagely smacked down by the courts.
Please learn the Constitution before you attempt to argue it.
Incidentally, I like any flavor of jelly bean except coconut. Where should I pick up my five?
As far as I have been able to determine, there have been no USSC cases that, by abridging the right to drive, relegate it to "priviledge" status.
Nor will you find SCOTUS cases declaring driving to be a privilege as opposed to a right. It has nothing to do with driving being a "right", though: it has to do with the fact that driving regulations are a State matter and are handled in State courts, and to the extent these matters have been brought in Federal courts, they've been dismissed on summary judgment.
The Constitution guarantees all free citizens (i.e., those who have not had their freedoms curtailed by legal process--e.g., convicted felons) the right to travel. It does not guarantee you the right to travel on anything other than your own two legs. Cities can regulate whether they allow horses on their roads, since your right to travel freely on a horse has to be weighed against the right of your fellow citizens not to have horseshit littering the sidewalk. The government can regulate whether you're allowed to fly a 747, because your right to travel freely by a plane you're piloting has to be weighed against the right of your fellow citizens not to have a Boeing crash in their back yard.
The right to travel is strong and sacrosanct in the United States. Travel by any method you choose is not, and has never been, a right.
Check Westlaw for caselaw. There's a staggering lot of it. In pretty much every single Federal district in the United States, someone's had the bright idea of contesting their license suspension by walking into a Federal court and claiming their Constitutional right to travel is being abridged. These things get dismissed on summary judgment, since the facts are not in dispute and the law is unambiguously clear.
I disagree with the "almost certainly", if only because to this day we still don't know who wrote a lot of Shakespeare's stuff. Did Will Shakespeare really write everything we associate with him? Or were the plays written by Francis Bacon, who gave them to Shakespeare to publish under his name so that Bacon could avoid the scandal of associating with actors? The editions of plays we have right now, are they accurate editions, or were they "improved" a little bit by successive publishers who wanted to change a line here or there? Did... etcetera. There's a lot of academic discussion about the authorship of Shakespeare, with very few absolute facts known.
Given how little we definitively know about the authorship of many of Shakespearean works, I think it's a little rash to try and describe who Will Shakespeare was when we don't know for a fact who wrote the things on which we're drawing our conclusions.
My point is simply that it's extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot like this with C++.
Heartily agreed. C++ has lots of sharp corners (including some corners in unexpected places--the erase-remove idiom is my favorite example). On the other hand, there are a lot of sharp corners which can be anticipated. Your STL container modification example is a good one--making assumptions about the internal state of an object after making modifying operations on that object is never a good idea, regardless of language.
And when it does happen, the source of the problem may be extremely difficult to trace.
Amen and preach it, brother. 99% of the anti-C++ rants I read really have little to nothing to do with the language (like a Greek chorus, hordes of Slashdotters shouting "C++ is slow! Templates are bloated! Objects are slow!") and completely ignore the difficulty of bughunting in C++... good Lord, could they have come up with a language more hostile to debuggers and programmers? I don't need 255-character-long mangled identifiers or five pages of compiler errors just because I forgot a semicolon in templatized code.
I'll be dancing on the rooftop when something better comes along.
For a lot of the problem domain they already have: Python, Java and C# all manage to get enough of C++'s functionality and speed to address a lot of the problem space. But for those circumstances where nothing less than the very best and very fastest will do, I think we're going to still wind up relying on C++.
The problem is you're making assumptions about the internal state of a container after you've made modifications to that container. When you get the farkle object, it's all good, because your assumption about the container's state happens to correspond to the container's actual state. Then you go and modify the container, and...
Moral of the story: when the STL documentation warns you that object references and pointers and everything else can potentially be invalidated after any modifying operation on the container, believe it.
I don't mean any offense, but it seems to me the problem is less with the STL than your understanding of it.
the problem is not that C++ is a ridiculously overfeatured programming language that abounds with subtle gotcha's, it's that most programmers just don't understand it well enough
Exactly; thank you for stating it so clearly. C++ is the Hole Hawg of programming languages; it gives the programmer access to a lot of power, a lot of very powerful techniques, and a lot of responsibility for using those techniques wisely and correctly.
If I give a teenager a Hole Hawg and he proceeds to auger a hole through his thigh, that doesn't mean the Hole Hawg is a ridiculously overpowered drill that abounds with danger. It means the Hole Hawg was the exact wrong tool for the teenager to be using.
I'm a strong advocate of using the right tool for the job. After spending over a decade using C++, I've finally come to the point where I can use the majority of its features (even the advanced ones) safely, effectively and efficiently. And I've also matured enough as a programmer to realize that 95% of the time I should be coding in Java, C# or Python, instead. (Ah, if only LISP had a better standard library...!)
I don't advocate using C++ for everything. But I do take exception to people who say it's overfeatured and abounds with subtle gotchas. That may well be true. But it's the responsibility of the programmer to use the right tool for the job. If you don't know C++ well enough to spot the gotchas and to harness C++'s incredible power, then don't use C++.
I'm tired of programmers blaming languages for their own failings. Especially when that failing is something as simple as failing to know their limits.
By your token then the Soviet Union was a "classicy story of the free market". I mean, it's not as if Migkoyan-Gurewitch and Suchoi didn't compete for the different government contracts.
Unfree market. If Mikoyan and Gureyvich decided "hey, we don't want to design airplanes anymore, we want to build a bicycle factory," could they have? Of course not: their skills were too essential to the State to lose. If Sukhoi said "hey, the money in aviation's good, but we could make more money making electric razors," could they have switched? Of course not.
In the case of pencillin, there was money to be made and so industry reallocated resources to produce penicillin--reallocation based on consumer demand, not Central Committee planning. Who was the consumer? The armed forces, in the beginning. After the armed forces had established the efficacy of pencillin, then a lot more consumers decided to jump on.
A nondeterministic Turing Machine is a Turing machine that guesses an answer and then checks it.
Bzzt. The defining trait of a nondeterministic Turing Machine is that it has a transition relation rather than a transition function. This can be achieved in many different ways. One way to get a transition relation is to create a TM which has the capability to make extremely accurate guesses; another way to get a transition relation is to allow the TM to pursue multiple paths simultaneously (but not allow those execution threads to communicate). There are lots more ways to do it.
What you're talking about is one possible implementation of the NDTM theory. Superpositional computation gives us another possible implementation. But in the end, they're both the exact same thing--Turing Machines.
A quantum computer is simply an implementation of a nondeterministic Turing Machine. It's not a different model in any way at all.
Most people, when they say "Turing Machines", implicitly assume "deterministic Turing Machines". This is unfortunate, because Turing's Computational Theory is rich enough to describe many things beyond simple deterministic TMs.
it wasn't until the US Army decided to invest heavily into the research into how to produce penicillin efficiently that it became plentifull enough that it could actually be used.
Right. The United States Army was the consumer in the free-market system. They said "hey, this product exists, and we want it". Some parts of industry disregarded this and preferred to focus on their own corners of the market. So the Army changed from pure consumer to producer, exactly as has happened in free markets since the dawn of time. Then, once other players in the market saw "hey, there's money to be made here!", they jumped on the bandwagon and penicillin became widely available.
Classic story of the free market. Just because the government had a major role in it doesn't mean it's not free marketeering. The government can be a consumer and/or a producer, just like anyone else.
If you want to name a deciding factor of the development 20th century medicine, war would be a much better bet.
In point of fact, war is my bet for the biggest force of medical advances in the 20th century. However, I believe the Jacquard loom is the biggest medical advance in the last millennium.
Right. Just like the rich wanted better medicine, and in the early 20th century capitalist industry invented penicillin and sulfa drugs and the rich benefitted. No, no poor people have ever benefitted from capitalist medical structures.
In reality, capitalism is the best thing for health. Do you know what the biggest, most amazingly life-saving medical invention of the last thousand years has been?
The Jacquard loom. Yes. The textile industry and the Industrial Revolution have saved more lives than all of medical science and antibiotics. Why? Because prior to the Jacquard loom, clothes were a luxury item. You had a shirt, you had trousers, you had shoes, you had underwear, and unless you were wealthy you probably only had one of each. That meant you wore the same clothes every single day--you never changed them--and since you never changed them, you never washed them--and that meant you were infested with ticks, lice and all manner of disease-carrying crawlies.
But with the invention of the Jacquard loom, suddenly clothes became available to the common person. You could have two or three sets of clothes! Amazing! And once clothes became available and commonplace to the masses, the masses did what kings and queens had done with their clothing--namely, took pride in them and wanted them to look their best. That meant washing them. That meant killing lice. That meant... controlling the spread of disease.
Once clothes moved from a you-got-one-pair-of-lousy-ones- just-like-everyone-else to a luxury item, health around the world began to improve.
So what's the biggest health innovation in the last thousand years? My vote is for the Jacquard loom, even moreso than the germ theory of disease.
So yeah. I guess capitalism will never help the poor stay healthy.
And they're wrong to do that. Wrong on both practical and moral levels. Morally, it's not right to hate: hatred leads to all manner of evils, and I'd hope people would at least have learned that much from history.
Practically, it's not the right thing to do. Once you begin to hate, your rationality gets clouded: you substitute passion for precision. And that lack of precision makes you a lamb to the slaughter for people who are still holding onto their reason.
I know enough to keep away. I don't hang around with republicans unless I have to. I don't invite them into my house, I don't regard them as friends.
How would you feel if I said "I know enough to keep away. I don't hang around with gays unless I have to. I don't invite them into my house, I don't regard them as my friends."
You'd probably think I was a narrow-minded bigot, you'd write me off as a lost cause, and you'd go on about your way.
For what it's worth, I'm not writing you off or accusing you of being a narrow-minded bigot. But I do think you need to open your mind a little bit and see the world is nowhere near as black and white as you want to believe.
Do you honestly believe that most republicans don't hate Hillary Clinton? I don't think even you believe that.
I do not personally know one single Republican who hates Hillary Clinton.
Let me repeat that once more, just so I know you'll get it: I do not personally know one single Republican who hates Hillary Clinton.
Not one. Zilch. Nada. Zero.
I know a lot of Republicans who dislike her, and a lot of Republicans who dislike her immensely, and I know a couple of Republicans who (regrettably) have let their anger for Bill Clinton yield to hate: but as far as Hillary goes, I do not personally know one single Republican who hates her. And I know a lot of Republicans.
Much like the parent poster, you apparently do not know "the Enemy" anywhere near as well as you think you do.
Ack, realized I quoted the wrong part of the link to you. Anyway, let me correct myself by showing you the portion I meant to cite:
In March of 1999, Lapp told me that his apparent interest in the civil defense aspects of fallout during the 1950s had been a ruse, an excuse to use fallout to tell the bomb-makers' secrets. And the biggest secret of all, the only one that really matters, is that the H-bomb is actually a uranium fission bomb. The lethal zone from fallout would vastly overshadow the lethal zone from blast and fire. A serious war fought with such weapons would poison entire continents. It would be war against the planet.
The public uproar over fallout led to one of the few comic sideshows of the period, the business of the "humanitarian H-bomb." Four of the 1956 Operation Redwing shots were full-scale multi-megaton H-bomb explosions. For two of those shots, all the unnecessary uranium had been removed from the device to produce a "clean" explosion, reportedly no more than 15% fission, the rest fusion. (I'd like to see more information before I believe that figure.) On July 19, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss announced that the new clean H-bombs were important "not only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian aspect. We are convinced that mass hazard from fallout is not a necessary complement to the use of large nuclear weapons."
... As you can see, I omitted an (important!) preceding paragraph.:)
I strongly recommend you read the entire link if you have the time. While the author definitely has a political argument to make, the author also does an excellent job of presenting facts to support his arguments. Even if you disagree with the arguments, the facts are quite interesting.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire), but in the 1960s there were the Bassoon Tests, which used hydrogen bombs where virtually 100% of the blast yield came from fusion.
So yes, we have the capability to artificially create fusion. We've had it for decades.
How did you manage to get modded "insightful" when your entire post is one giant troll and straw-man argument against people you neither understand nor wish to?
I'm a conservative Republican. I have some pretty strong Libertarian leanings, but given the Libertarian party is fond of putting up candidates like Howard Stern for major political positions, I can't in good conscience throw myself in with them. So, as a conservative Republican, let me respond to your twenty bits o' trollage.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, without regard to your occupation, fame, or anything else. However, being a drug addict does not prevent you from also being human, and thus deserving of human dignity and compassion. There is no contradiction here: the "contradiction" only exists because you're unwilling to consider that "the Enemy" (which is to say, me and people like me) may have views which don't reduce down into a three-second sound bite.
The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
The United States shouldn't get out of the United Nations, but at the same time, we shouldn't have any delusions that the United Nations confers legitimacy. The majority of nations at the U.N. are totalitarian dictatorships, and it is beyond me how you can imagine that a bureaucracy of despots can confer legitimacy.
I don't like dealing with the U.N., but I'm fanatically in favor of dealing with NATO, with the European Community, and with basically any other multinational organization composed of free nations.
But until such time as we're able to come up with a better alternative to the U.N., should U.N. mandates be obeyed? Yes, unless doing so would directly and substantially reduce our security. For instance, I think we should be pressing Israel to return to their 1967 borders, as required by a Security Council resolution; and I think Israel is within rights to say "screw you, do you have any idea how tiny those borders are? We could be overrun in a matter of hours!"
Again, there's no contradiction here. The contradictions only seem to exist because you're not willing to view the other side as anything more than a straw man.
Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.
Government should relax regulations at all levels. The more laws you pass, the more you're going to inhibit economic development. If you don't believe me, just look at France--or ask JFK, who cut income taxes by huge amounts expecting that it would lead to an increase in tax revenues and a boosted economy. (Both happened, by the by.)
With regard to marijuana... I believe government should enforce the law and I believe the Federal government should, in most things, defer to the states. It's a matter of constant irritation to me that our current administration has sicced the FDA on those states who've enacted laws allowing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. That's something the Left would do, override local government in favor of the divine wisdom of Washington. Conservatives, speaking generally, strongly doubt the divine wisdom of Washington and prefer to let states and municipalities handle things.
"Standing Tall for America'" means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.
Read some basic economics books, starting with David Ricardo. Until such time as you learn some microeconomics, please don't give people economic advice.
And no, Ricardo isn't some neocon or some colleague of Milton Friedman. He's an 18th-century economist and a peer of Adam Smith. I hav
You're bang-on right: [t]he government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
We, the citizenry, have established a Constitution which establishes our government. Our government is one of enumerated powers: the government is allowed to do something if and only if the Constitution says we, the citizenry, will allow the government to do this.
Many of the states have in their state constitutions the same basic idea as in the Federal Constitution: unless the state constitution explicitly permits the state to do something, the state may not do that something.
So there are really two questions here: (a) does the Missouri Constitution allow local governments to compete with businesses? and (b) does the Telecommunications Reform Act allow local governments to compete with businesses?
If either of the two is "no", then we, the citizens, have decided government's purpose is not to get involved in the local phone business. And guess what?
The answer is "no".
So yes, the government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
And that's precisely why this case was decided correctly.
There's a legal doctrine which addresses this issue. I can't remember the precise term for it, but the Judiciary is allowed to be a litigant before itself. It's somewhat frowned upon, but the logic goes as follows: under the Constitution, the only branch of the government with standing to hear grievances against the government is the Judiciary. If the Judiciary has a grievance against another branch of the government, it is the Judiciary's Constitutional duty to hear its own case.
For obvious reasons, this is really frowned upon. The Judiciary tends to judge itself much more harshly than it judges others.
For instance, under the Constitution the Federal government is not allowed to reduce the pay of a judge during his/her term of good behavior. Sounds straightforward, right? Up until you consider that Federal judges haven't had a COLA (Cost Of Living Adjustment) in a decade. Due to inflation, Federal judges are getting paid about fourteen percent less today than they were in the '80s.
During this time, Congress has made it a priority to give itself frequent and generous COLAs (when they haven't been giving themselves outright raises). It's outraged a large number of judges, who are--in terms of real buying power--getting their salaries cut by over an eighth despite the Constitution's guarantee that Congress is forbidden from doing that.
So some particularly outraged judges filed a lawsuit against Congress, suing them to compel them to give the Judiciary a proper COLA. The Judiciary heard this lawsuit, because (a) nobody in their right mind could say the judges didn't have a legitimate grievance against the government, and (b) the Judiciary is the only agency authorized to hear these grievances.
In the end, the suit was dismissed before trial. A trial is for the determination of facts, but there were no facts in disagreement. The disagreement was purely one about law, and those disagreements tend to be handled in pre-trial motions. The plaintiffs claimed that Congress' refusal to pass a COLA amounted to an unconstitutional cut in salary, and the respondent (the United States Solicitor-General, I think) claimed that Congress only says their salary shall not be cut, not that they're entitled to COLA increases in salary.
The judge hearing the case decided the Solicitor-General had the correct view of the law. The question of law was resolved in the government's favor, and given that there was no violation of law, the plaintiff's lawsuit quietly vanished.
All of this is if-I-recall-correctly. I may be in error on some details, but I think that I'm right on the major points.
(Also, a sidebar: the next time you hear about how government jobs are cushy and high-ranking spots like judicial appointments are overpaid, consider this: on average, a Federal judge gets paid less than a quarter what they would make in private practice. The Judiciary is facing an exodus of judges into the private sector because the $120,000 salary of a Chief Judge of an Appellate Court simply doesn't compare to the $1-million-or-more they could make in a law firm. Are judges paid well? Yes. Are they paid market rates? Not even close.)
Yes. You apparently have not, not even the part of it which you're attempting to cite to me:
and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States
How can Congress and/or the Executive Branch enter into a treaty which violates the Constitution, given the Constitution does not grant Congress and/or the Executive Branch the authority to violate the Constitution? An unconstitutional treaty is not one made under the authority of the United States; and thus it's no law at all.
Now in Reid v. Covert the Supreme Court said that treaties had to be constitutional, but we made it 150 years without that decision
Yes, because for 150 years it was considered so self-evident the Supreme Court didn't see the need to remind people of "hey, the Constitution says you can't do this particular thing..."
it could be reversed one day
So could Marbury v Madison. If you want me to take the "Reid could be reversed one day" line seriously, you're going to have to explain to me why, under what theory of law, and what currently existing circumstances make it likely, that Reid will be overturned.
Finally, this merely prohibits treaties that explicitly violate one or more Constitutional provisions
Such as the ICC's failure to guarantee the right to a jury trial and the right to a grand jury presentment.
The Supremes have repreatedly ruled that in fact, the US government preceded the Constitution, not the other way around
Case law, please. The last time I spoke with the Chief Judge of the local Circuit Court, he was quite crystal clear that the Constitution establishes the government, not vice-versa.
We the people of the United States... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. That's from the Preamble right there: the people established the Constitution, and the Constitution gives structure to the United States Government. There is no judiciary except that established in Article III. There is no Presidency except that established in Article II. There is no Congress except that established in Article I. For the government to have preceeded the Constitution--and to be superior to it--it would have to dominate the Constitution. Instead, the Constitution dominates it.
Therefore, unless you can point me to crystal-clear case law, I'm going to write you off as someone who knows just enough Con Law to be really dangerous.
We already extradite to countries without the protections of the US Constitution
Yes. But we aren't a signed party to their legal system, which is what happens as soon as we sign on the dotted line of the ICC. As soon as we sign on the dotted line, Congress is committing itself to violating the Constitutional rights of Americans.
And as the Constitution makes clear, that is not allowed.
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Judging a programming language by only one metric--how long it takes to learn--is foolish. Programming languages need to be judged by more metrics than that.
For instance, ease of programming; C++ is a very easy language to program in, once you understand it. (The learning curve is steeper than the Matterhorn, but once you climb the learning curve, the language's ease is amazing.)
Or raw power. In skilled hands, C++ gives cleaner and tighter code than C. As a real quick example of this, compare C++'s sort algorithm against C's qsort. The C++ sort uses a slower algorithm (most implementations use either an introsort or a tuned mergesort) and yet it routinely comes in 250% faster than C's qsort. Why? Because of aggressive code inlining and the way C++ doesn't need multiple sets of (slow) function pointers to do the comparisons.
Or flexibility. In C, you only have one way to solve a problem--procedurally. (Anyone who tells me they can write object-oriented code in C will be summarily beaten. You can shove a rocket motor up a pig's ass, but that doesn't mean I'm going to smile and happily say the pig is now capable of independent flight.) In C++, you've got access to procedural, object-oriented, functional and generic paradigms, and I've even seen declarative logic done without an excessive amount of work. Now, it's true that C++'s implementation of some of these paradigms is weaker than in some languages specifically devoted to those paradigms--for instance, C++'s object model is less elegant than Objective C's or Smalltalk's, and C++'s functional code is less elegant than LISP's or SML's--but C++ supports plenty enough of those paradigms to be able to do some seriously heavy lifting in all of them. What's the usefulness of the multiple paradigms? Simply this: some problems are easier to solve when thinking of them in one way than they are when thinking of them in another. By being a pervasively multiparadigmatic language, C++ lets you mix and match from different styles of problem-solving at will, in order to best accomplish the task at hand. (As an example, I've asked undergrads to write me the Sieve of Eratosthenes in C... then I show them how purely-functional LISP can beat C's performance... and then I show them how purely-functional C++ even beats LISP's performance.)
Now, all that's a whole farking lot of major goodness. All that's incredible goodness, not to put too fine a point on it. And against this incredible goodness, you have one major, critical flaw:
Optimistically, it'll take you five years to hit this point. More if you have to learn by yourself without any mentors around, because then practically the only way you have to learn about C++'s sharp corners is by running into them.
But on the other hand, in the last few years some truly excellent C++ textbooks have come out--Scott Meyer's Effective C++, More Effective C++ and Effective STL, Koenig and Moo's Accelerated C++, Alandrescu's Modern C++ Design, Plauger, Stepanov and Lee's The C++ Standard Template Library, Josutti's The C++ Standard Library... none of these excellent tomes existed when I was learning C++. It's only since the draft standard became finalized that we really began to see the textbooks we need.
Is C++ worth learning? Absolutely. The payoff to you, the programmer, is immense. Is C++ easy to learn? No. Learning curve like the Matterhorn. Should C++ supplant other programming languages? No. When I don't need C++'s raw power, I use Java, C# or Python.
But when the chips are down and I need to crunch numbers like nobody's business... that's when I reach for C++.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to pursue advanced degrees that have nothing to do with committing to academia. One of them happens to be "so that I can get a better job and out of the programming ghetto".But if you're not in academia, how many professors do you know and do you know them well enough to know their professional resumes? I know three professors who've delivered large projects for industry, and that's just in a fairly small department at one school. (Heck, my advisor still continues to hack on a 10KLOC LISP library that he maintains by himself.)
Your boss is right, and it sucks, and I wish it could be otherwise. Unfortunately, reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
I'm a graduate student. As such, I see a lot of code both from students and from professors. The students have an excuse for lousy code. The professors don't.
In one of the undergraduate CompSci courses, a professor asked on an exam a Java question which could not be answered correctly. If you didn't know Java very well, you'd give an answer which, at first blush, you'd think would work fine, but would have all manner of subtle problems later on down the road. If you knew Java well enough to use a different technique and avoid these subtle problems, you got zero credit for it because you didn't demonstrate any knowledge of how to use the techniques which were being tested on the exam.
I'm not making this stuff up. This stuff is far from unusual; in any reasonably large department there's going to be someone who's too incompetent to ever get anywhere in the research side of things, so where do they wind up? Teaching undergraduate courses instead. The best minds cloister themselves in research and graduate classes; the worst minds get to teach the next generation.
So what happens when these undergrads leave school and go into the real world? Well, if they're talented, smart and willing to work like hell, they'll spend the next five or six years mastering languages and techniques and getting painful lessons from bitter experience. On the other hand, 90% of them say <Keanu> "I know Java-Fu." </Keanu> And they don't, and they can't be persuaded that they don't. Because after all, they have a Bachelor's degree, right? That means they know this stuff, right?
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years actively engaged in learning, in developing new skills, in finding interesting corners and how-to-do-weird-things, is a gift from the Almighty. Treasure these people. They are rare.
Someone who's got twelve years of C++ experience and has spent those twelve years doing the same sorts of problems the same way over and over and over again is eleven years past their sell-by date.
There are a lot more of the latter than the former.
Pre-Y2K I was hired by a major telecommunications company. I soon found myself an unofficial liaison to the UNIX development group, because being a recent college grad I understood modern C++. The UNIX development group had a lot of programmers, some who'd started using C++ in 1983... and none of them had kept abreast of the ever-evolving C++ spec past '93. That meant that when we got an updated C++ compiler that was stricter and more standards-conformant, half their code immediately crapped out all over the place, and I got dragged over to the UNIX dev group to walk them through modernizing their code.
So imagine that you're the manager of the UNIX dev group. What you see are a bunch of old graybeards with 20+ years of software experience (and salaries to match!), who are relying on a twentysomething not six months out of college to tell them how to make their code compile.
What would you as the manager think? Would you think "damn, that kid must be really hot!", or would you think "damn, experience in programming is really overrated!"?
Now, these guys who didn't know beans about modern C++ knew every single bug, quirk and weirdness in the phone system. They were walking Bugzillas for phreaking, fraud and mayhem. They knew every RS-6000, they knew every weirdness of our systems. But once outside the very narrow domain of our systems, they were completely out of their depth. They were essentially unemployable as programmers given how dated their programming knowledge was.
There are a lot of guys like that out there. They far outnumber the hardcore geeks who never stop learning and who pride themselves on always staying current.
You agreed with the person who did state that, without actually restating it yourself.
No, I demonstrated the existence of a Constitutional right to travel, which someone (foolishly) disputed. (Ironically, the person who disputed this was the same person who argued there was a Constitutional right to drive...) Read the entire thread. At any rate, I'm done.
Congress has no right to prevent you from doing this. None at all. Where's the problem?
The State, on the other hand, does have the right to tell you "you can't deliberately kill someone who's not threatening your life". And in this case, that's exactly what the State does.
Please learn about the Federal-State distinction.
And incidentally, if you'd have actually read my prior posts, you'd have discovered I wasn't the one advocating "the right to do X" does not mean "the right to do X by any means I choose".
Please read my post next time, too.
You seem to be operating under a critical misunderstanding of how this country works. I don't need to cite the Constitution to show that I have a right; you have to be able to cite the Constitution to show that Congress has a certain power! (Article I, Sec. 8, Clauses 1-18 are an exhaustive listing of the sorts and categories of national laws Congress may enact. You may want to look there first.)
"Regulating travel among the several States" is not listed anywhere in the Constitution under the powers reserved to the government. As such, under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, that right explicitly falls to the State and the individual. This has been upheld in Crandell v Nevada and Edwards v California, both of which were attempts to enforce direct restrictions on travel. Both were savagely smacked down by the courts.
Please learn the Constitution before you attempt to argue it.
Incidentally, I like any flavor of jelly bean except coconut. Where should I pick up my five?
The Constitution guarantees all free citizens (i.e., those who have not had their freedoms curtailed by legal process--e.g., convicted felons) the right to travel. It does not guarantee you the right to travel on anything other than your own two legs. Cities can regulate whether they allow horses on their roads, since your right to travel freely on a horse has to be weighed against the right of your fellow citizens not to have horseshit littering the sidewalk. The government can regulate whether you're allowed to fly a 747, because your right to travel freely by a plane you're piloting has to be weighed against the right of your fellow citizens not to have a Boeing crash in their back yard.
The right to travel is strong and sacrosanct in the United States. Travel by any method you choose is not, and has never been, a right.
Check Westlaw for caselaw. There's a staggering lot of it. In pretty much every single Federal district in the United States, someone's had the bright idea of contesting their license suspension by walking into a Federal court and claiming their Constitutional right to travel is being abridged. These things get dismissed on summary judgment, since the facts are not in dispute and the law is unambiguously clear.
I disagree with the "almost certainly", if only because to this day we still don't know who wrote a lot of Shakespeare's stuff. Did Will Shakespeare really write everything we associate with him? Or were the plays written by Francis Bacon, who gave them to Shakespeare to publish under his name so that Bacon could avoid the scandal of associating with actors? The editions of plays we have right now, are they accurate editions, or were they "improved" a little bit by successive publishers who wanted to change a line here or there? Did ... etcetera. There's a lot of academic discussion about the authorship of Shakespeare, with very few absolute facts known.
Given how little we definitively know about the authorship of many of Shakespearean works, I think it's a little rash to try and describe who Will Shakespeare was when we don't know for a fact who wrote the things on which we're drawing our conclusions.
The problem is you're making assumptions about the internal state of a container after you've made modifications to that container. When you get the farkle object, it's all good, because your assumption about the container's state happens to correspond to the container's actual state. Then you go and modify the container, and...
Moral of the story: when the STL documentation warns you that object references and pointers and everything else can potentially be invalidated after any modifying operation on the container, believe it.
I don't mean any offense, but it seems to me the problem is less with the STL than your understanding of it.
If I give a teenager a Hole Hawg and he proceeds to auger a hole through his thigh, that doesn't mean the Hole Hawg is a ridiculously overpowered drill that abounds with danger. It means the Hole Hawg was the exact wrong tool for the teenager to be using.
I'm a strong advocate of using the right tool for the job. After spending over a decade using C++, I've finally come to the point where I can use the majority of its features (even the advanced ones) safely, effectively and efficiently. And I've also matured enough as a programmer to realize that 95% of the time I should be coding in Java, C# or Python, instead. (Ah, if only LISP had a better standard library...!)
I don't advocate using C++ for everything. But I do take exception to people who say it's overfeatured and abounds with subtle gotchas. That may well be true. But it's the responsibility of the programmer to use the right tool for the job. If you don't know C++ well enough to spot the gotchas and to harness C++'s incredible power, then don't use C++.
I'm tired of programmers blaming languages for their own failings. Especially when that failing is something as simple as failing to know their limits.
In the case of pencillin, there was money to be made and so industry reallocated resources to produce penicillin--reallocation based on consumer demand, not Central Committee planning. Who was the consumer? The armed forces, in the beginning. After the armed forces had established the efficacy of pencillin, then a lot more consumers decided to jump on.
A nondeterministic Turing Machine is a Turing machine that guesses an answer and then checks it.
Bzzt. The defining trait of a nondeterministic Turing Machine is that it has a transition relation rather than a transition function. This can be achieved in many different ways. One way to get a transition relation is to create a TM which has the capability to make extremely accurate guesses; another way to get a transition relation is to allow the TM to pursue multiple paths simultaneously (but not allow those execution threads to communicate). There are lots more ways to do it.
What you're talking about is one possible implementation of the NDTM theory. Superpositional computation gives us another possible implementation. But in the end, they're both the exact same thing--Turing Machines.
A quantum computer is simply an implementation of a nondeterministic Turing Machine. It's not a different model in any way at all.
Most people, when they say "Turing Machines", implicitly assume "deterministic Turing Machines". This is unfortunate, because Turing's Computational Theory is rich enough to describe many things beyond simple deterministic TMs.
Classic story of the free market. Just because the government had a major role in it doesn't mean it's not free marketeering. The government can be a consumer and/or a producer, just like anyone else.In point of fact, war is my bet for the biggest force of medical advances in the 20th century. However, I believe the Jacquard loom is the biggest medical advance in the last millennium.
In reality, capitalism is the best thing for health. Do you know what the biggest, most amazingly life-saving medical invention of the last thousand years has been?
The Jacquard loom. Yes. The textile industry and the Industrial Revolution have saved more lives than all of medical science and antibiotics. Why? Because prior to the Jacquard loom, clothes were a luxury item. You had a shirt, you had trousers, you had shoes, you had underwear, and unless you were wealthy you probably only had one of each. That meant you wore the same clothes every single day--you never changed them--and since you never changed them, you never washed them--and that meant you were infested with ticks, lice and all manner of disease-carrying crawlies.
But with the invention of the Jacquard loom, suddenly clothes became available to the common person. You could have two or three sets of clothes! Amazing! And once clothes became available and commonplace to the masses, the masses did what kings and queens had done with their clothing--namely, took pride in them and wanted them to look their best. That meant washing them. That meant killing lice. That meant... controlling the spread of disease.
Once clothes moved from a you-got-one-pair-of-lousy-ones- just-like-everyone-else to a luxury item, health around the world began to improve.
So what's the biggest health innovation in the last thousand years? My vote is for the Jacquard loom, even moreso than the germ theory of disease.
So yeah. I guess capitalism will never help the poor stay healthy
Practically, it's not the right thing to do. Once you begin to hate, your rationality gets clouded: you substitute passion for precision. And that lack of precision makes you a lamb to the slaughter for people who are still holding onto their reason.How would you feel if I said "I know enough to keep away. I don't hang around with gays unless I have to. I don't invite them into my house, I don't regard them as my friends."
You'd probably think I was a narrow-minded bigot, you'd write me off as a lost cause, and you'd go on about your way.
For what it's worth, I'm not writing you off or accusing you of being a narrow-minded bigot. But I do think you need to open your mind a little bit and see the world is nowhere near as black and white as you want to believe.
Let me repeat that once more, just so I know you'll get it: I do not personally know one single Republican who hates Hillary Clinton.
Not one. Zilch. Nada. Zero.
I know a lot of Republicans who dislike her, and a lot of Republicans who dislike her immensely, and I know a couple of Republicans who (regrettably) have let their anger for Bill Clinton yield to hate: but as far as Hillary goes, I do not personally know one single Republican who hates her. And I know a lot of Republicans.
Much like the parent poster, you apparently do not know "the Enemy" anywhere near as well as you think you do.
Slashdot lost my first post which had the link to the Federation of American Scientists paper "The Holocaust Bomb: A Question of Time".
I strongly recommend you read the entire link if you have the time. While the author definitely has a political argument to make, the author also does an excellent job of presenting facts to support his arguments. Even if you disagree with the arguments, the facts are quite interesting.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire), but in the 1960s there were the Bassoon Tests, which used hydrogen bombs where virtually 100% of the blast yield came from fusion.
So yes, we have the capability to artificially create fusion. We've had it for decades.
I'm a conservative Republican. I have some pretty strong Libertarian leanings, but given the Libertarian party is fond of putting up candidates like Howard Stern for major political positions, I can't in good conscience throw myself in with them. So, as a conservative Republican, let me respond to your twenty bits o' trollage.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, without regard to your occupation, fame, or anything else. However, being a drug addict does not prevent you from also being human, and thus deserving of human dignity and compassion. There is no contradiction here: the "contradiction" only exists because you're unwilling to consider that "the Enemy" (which is to say, me and people like me) may have views which don't reduce down into a three-second sound bite.
The United States shouldn't get out of the United Nations, but at the same time, we shouldn't have any delusions that the United Nations confers legitimacy. The majority of nations at the U.N. are totalitarian dictatorships, and it is beyond me how you can imagine that a bureaucracy of despots can confer legitimacy.
I don't like dealing with the U.N., but I'm fanatically in favor of dealing with NATO, with the European Community, and with basically any other multinational organization composed of free nations.
But until such time as we're able to come up with a better alternative to the U.N., should U.N. mandates be obeyed? Yes, unless doing so would directly and substantially reduce our security. For instance, I think we should be pressing Israel to return to their 1967 borders, as required by a Security Council resolution; and I think Israel is within rights to say "screw you, do you have any idea how tiny those borders are? We could be overrun in a matter of hours!"
Again, there's no contradiction here. The contradictions only seem to exist because you're not willing to view the other side as anything more than a straw man.
Government should relax regulations at all levels. The more laws you pass, the more you're going to inhibit economic development. If you don't believe me, just look at France--or ask JFK, who cut income taxes by huge amounts expecting that it would lead to an increase in tax revenues and a boosted economy. (Both happened, by the by.)
With regard to marijuana... I believe government should enforce the law and I believe the Federal government should, in most things, defer to the states. It's a matter of constant irritation to me that our current administration has sicced the FDA on those states who've enacted laws allowing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. That's something the Left would do, override local government in favor of the divine wisdom of Washington. Conservatives, speaking generally, strongly doubt the divine wisdom of Washington and prefer to let states and municipalities handle things.
Read some basic economics books, starting with David Ricardo. Until such time as you learn some microeconomics, please don't give people economic advice.
And no, Ricardo isn't some neocon or some colleague of Milton Friedman. He's an 18th-century economist and a peer of Adam Smith. I hav
You're bang-on right: [t]he government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
We, the citizenry, have established a Constitution which establishes our government. Our government is one of enumerated powers: the government is allowed to do something if and only if the Constitution says we, the citizenry, will allow the government to do this.
Many of the states have in their state constitutions the same basic idea as in the Federal Constitution: unless the state constitution explicitly permits the state to do something, the state may not do that something.
So there are really two questions here: (a) does the Missouri Constitution allow local governments to compete with businesses? and (b) does the Telecommunications Reform Act allow local governments to compete with businesses?
If either of the two is "no", then we, the citizens, have decided government's purpose is not to get involved in the local phone business. And guess what?
The answer is "no".
So yes, the government's purpose is whatever its citizens decide it should be.
And that's precisely why this case was decided correctly.
There's a legal doctrine which addresses this issue. I can't remember the precise term for it, but the Judiciary is allowed to be a litigant before itself. It's somewhat frowned upon, but the logic goes as follows: under the Constitution, the only branch of the government with standing to hear grievances against the government is the Judiciary. If the Judiciary has a grievance against another branch of the government, it is the Judiciary's Constitutional duty to hear its own case.
For obvious reasons, this is really frowned upon. The Judiciary tends to judge itself much more harshly than it judges others.
For instance, under the Constitution the Federal government is not allowed to reduce the pay of a judge during his/her term of good behavior. Sounds straightforward, right? Up until you consider that Federal judges haven't had a COLA (Cost Of Living Adjustment) in a decade. Due to inflation, Federal judges are getting paid about fourteen percent less today than they were in the '80s.
During this time, Congress has made it a priority to give itself frequent and generous COLAs (when they haven't been giving themselves outright raises). It's outraged a large number of judges, who are--in terms of real buying power--getting their salaries cut by over an eighth despite the Constitution's guarantee that Congress is forbidden from doing that.
So some particularly outraged judges filed a lawsuit against Congress, suing them to compel them to give the Judiciary a proper COLA. The Judiciary heard this lawsuit, because (a) nobody in their right mind could say the judges didn't have a legitimate grievance against the government, and (b) the Judiciary is the only agency authorized to hear these grievances.
In the end, the suit was dismissed before trial. A trial is for the determination of facts, but there were no facts in disagreement. The disagreement was purely one about law, and those disagreements tend to be handled in pre-trial motions. The plaintiffs claimed that Congress' refusal to pass a COLA amounted to an unconstitutional cut in salary, and the respondent (the United States Solicitor-General, I think) claimed that Congress only says their salary shall not be cut, not that they're entitled to COLA increases in salary.
The judge hearing the case decided the Solicitor-General had the correct view of the law. The question of law was resolved in the government's favor, and given that there was no violation of law, the plaintiff's lawsuit quietly vanished.
All of this is if-I-recall-correctly. I may be in error on some details, but I think that I'm right on the major points.
(Also, a sidebar: the next time you hear about how government jobs are cushy and high-ranking spots like judicial appointments are overpaid, consider this: on average, a Federal judge gets paid less than a quarter what they would make in private practice. The Judiciary is facing an exodus of judges into the private sector because the $120,000 salary of a Chief Judge of an Appellate Court simply doesn't compare to the $1-million-or-more they could make in a law firm. Are judges paid well? Yes. Are they paid market rates? Not even close.)
Have you read the Constitution?
... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. That's from the Preamble right there: the people established the Constitution, and the Constitution gives structure to the United States Government. There is no judiciary except that established in Article III. There is no Presidency except that established in Article II. There is no Congress except that established in Article I. For the government to have preceeded the Constitution--and to be superior to it--it would have to dominate the Constitution. Instead, the Constitution dominates it.
Yes. You apparently have not, not even the part of it which you're attempting to cite to me:
and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States
How can Congress and/or the Executive Branch enter into a treaty which violates the Constitution, given the Constitution does not grant Congress and/or the Executive Branch the authority to violate the Constitution? An unconstitutional treaty is not one made under the authority of the United States; and thus it's no law at all.
Now in Reid v. Covert the Supreme Court said that treaties had to be constitutional, but we made it 150 years without that decision
Yes, because for 150 years it was considered so self-evident the Supreme Court didn't see the need to remind people of "hey, the Constitution says you can't do this particular thing..."
it could be reversed one day
So could Marbury v Madison. If you want me to take the "Reid could be reversed one day" line seriously, you're going to have to explain to me why, under what theory of law, and what currently existing circumstances make it likely, that Reid will be overturned.
Finally, this merely prohibits treaties that explicitly violate one or more Constitutional provisions
Such as the ICC's failure to guarantee the right to a jury trial and the right to a grand jury presentment.
The Supremes have repreatedly ruled that in fact, the US government preceded the Constitution, not the other way around
Case law, please. The last time I spoke with the Chief Judge of the local Circuit Court, he was quite crystal clear that the Constitution establishes the government, not vice-versa.
We the people of the United States
Therefore, unless you can point me to crystal-clear case law, I'm going to write you off as someone who knows just enough Con Law to be really dangerous.
We already extradite to countries without the protections of the US Constitution
Yes. But we aren't a signed party to their legal system, which is what happens as soon as we sign on the dotted line of the ICC. As soon as we sign on the dotted line, Congress is committing itself to violating the Constitutional rights of Americans.
And as the Constitution makes clear, that is not allowed.