That's complete and utter hogwash. You think imperial is "natural" simply because you are more used to it. Any non-American (except for a few Brits, Aussies and Kanuks) think metric units are more "natural".
The argument that it was "natural" was that it is relative to parts of the human body. 1 inch is typically the width of a man's thumb, and 1ft is typically the length of his foot. 2.54 cm is just an awkward number in the same respect. And yes, I often estimate by using my thumb or foot. For instance, when we were looking at houses, I would often check room sizes by stepping them out.
Now, there is no question that computing with metric units is way more natural. Here is an example: you need to put 12 equally-spaced fence posts along a particular length, say 13 feet 5 inches and 3/8. How far apart should the fence post be? You need to divide 12'5''3/8 by 11. Go ahead, I'm waiting..... still computing? OK the imperial answer is 1 foot, 2 inches and 2/3. Oh wait, you can't have 2/3! you can only have binary fractions! What's the closest
binary fraction to to 2/3? Errr, 43/64?
Or you just mark off the two end points, and then use your own foot to mark about where each post should go. Good enough for government work, and no other tools or calculations necessary - calculator or pen/pencil.
That said, there is nothing prohibiting you from having 2/3rds of an inch. Some tools (e.g. nuts, bolts, etc.) may not measure that way, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't have that in a drawing or anything else. If need be, you just round as appropriate.
The Fahrenheit scale in particular is extremely good for weather in most of the world, much better than C. 10 degrees F seems to roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people (60-cool, 70-just right, 80-warm, 90-hot).
That's just because you are usede to it. Look, at a conversion rate of 5/9 you get 10 degrees F roughly equal to 5 degres C. Which makes 5 degrees C roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people -- which really seems no more onerous.
If you code GM Lan, Ford or J1939 you will notice that everything is metric. We then convert to english system to please the ignorant masses.
There is no issues with other countries, everything is metric until you display stuff. What I found amusing is when I coded a cluster for a Daimler Engine communication was J1587 which is all english system. Daimler is from Germany for those who do not know.
In our Electronic designs everything is metric.
Basically everything is metric except on the surface. The politicians don't have the balls to tell the morons that it would be wise to adapt.
There were large opposition when the change was made in Canada, when you talk about degrees Farenheit they give you looks like you are some kind of weird alien.
May be not; but not always. The car companies - all of them - went through at least a period when they were using both metric and imperial. So you'd pull out the metric set, and start working on to find part way through that a bolt was actually imperial; next time you'd pull out the imperial set, find the reverse. Eventually you just start pulling out both sets. True on both my old 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis (aka Ford Crown Victoria, Lincoln Town Car) and my parent's 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager. I'll find out soon if that it is still true on my 2005 Mazda3 (haven't done much work on it yet) and 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan.
And that's the other side of the problem - Americans are use to working with both units on the same devices. Cooking, on the other hand, is a different issue as everyone is primarily use to either (i) cooking by feel (e.g. little or no measurements at all) or (ii) cooking by strict recipe in which nearly all recipes are 100% imperial units.
Road signs are in miles, beer comes in pints (proper ones, too, none of this 473ml rubbish) but that's it, officially speaking; packaging and so forth is all in metric. Obviously there are plenty of people who still think in Imperial, and strangely much more so than most other countries I've visited (maybe just that I have more experience with older British people, maybe it was more ingrained; it's not something I've though a lot about), but in terms of official business the change has long since succeeded, and in terms of public perception it crawls further towards metric with every generation. For what it's worth, I'm from the UK and when you say 'gallon' my brain says 'about 4 litres'.
Not quite. Their railroad system is in Miles+Chains namely due to the fact that Chains were the old surveyors tool so to keep everything tracking they still use 'em.
My laptop, my phone, and my tablet should all just be viewports and ways of interacting with one homogenous device. They should all be integrated parts of a whole.
To that end, I do not care which thing has which feature. I just care that I can seamlessly access the Internet no matter where I am.
So you want a Motorola Atrix. It's available. Pricey, but available.
As a human being with a mind and a means to communicate its thoughts, you can always make new content. That's the point of copyright law. To make you creative, instead of letting you just steal someone else's work.
As the AC's have pointed out, that may be the intent of Copyright Law, but the massive media companies - Sony, Disney, RIAA, MPAA, etc - have all subverted it to protect their monopolies from ever going into the public domain. They actively work to extend copyright terms to prevent people from using things that they created nearly 100 years ago. Mickey Mouse first debuted in the 1920's - but Disney will have to be dissolved as a company before they'll let Mickey or any of their other characters enter the public domain.
The irony is, the same rules apply to them. So it also limits what materials they can use to create new materials without breaking Copyright Law. Not that that has stopped them mind you - they (Disney at least) have actively stolen materials and modified "just enough" to get around Copyright Law when licensing negotiations have broken down in their opinion.
They've pushed so hard to make Copyright law so strong in order to enforce their monopolies forever on their own content that they've excluded themselves from being able to get a hold of new content at reasonable prices in reasonable time frames, thus inhibiting their ability to make new works. Ironic, no?
This is plausible, IMO, if their internal network is configured to disallow all incoming connections, but allows outgoing HTTP/HTTPS connections via a proxy (who can live without the Internets in this age?). You can't exploit services remotely, because the ports are being blocked, so the only strategies left is to either bring the virus into the network via USB (i.e. infect the entire country and hope that someone will bring it to the internal network), trick someone to download and install it (which is difficult when you don't know who has access to the network) or attack the actual firewall (fat chance, plus the IDS would raise red flags, assuming it could detect malicious packets). As soon as the virus gets in, it could easily make requests to a server in Texas via the proxy.
Secured networks do not allow Internet access period. It's called a one-way gateway. Data can go one direction, but it cannot return. Thus, data from a lower security network can get to a higher security network, but it cannot go vice versa. So again, it wouldn't be able to get to the Internet from where it was doing the damage even if the networks were connected.
The simplest possible spoken language would be a single phoneme per meaning, correct?
Only if one limited it strictly to vowels, and syllabic consonants. Vowel distinction is incredibly hard, and typically in the range of 3 to maybe 10 pure vowels at most. The naive thoughts about what would be "simple" in a language is getting in the way here.
True. There are generally at least 3 major language families: tonal (e.g. Thai), click (e.g. Aborigine), and phonetic (e.g English). Now the majority of the world is primarily phonetic languages, and these split up into numerous categories. I'm not familiar enough with tonal and click languages to say how the break down; but they are primarily centralized in regions of Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Though you also have to define a vowel. Not every language necessarily considers the same thing a vowel; so that could very. One language I'm working on for series treats 'c', 'p', and 's' as a vowel - it's got the 5 common vowels, plus about 4 or 5 functionary vowels that I can think of off the top of my head; over 30 letters in the primary alphabet.
Thus the number of meanings, or words, you can produce are restricted to the number of phonemes sounds that can be physically produced.
Theoretically yes... but the vast array of phonemes in languages cannot exist all on their own, and require "carrier" signals upon which to be formed. The carrier signals are vowels, and the bumps and hisses around them are the consonants and typically carry the most amount of phonemic distinction.
Except tonal and click languages don't necessarily have vowels and consonants. For example, in Thai you can say a complete sentence with the same phonetic sound by simply variant the pitch (tone). But then, vowels and consonants are more for written language than spoken - so (again) definitions are a must.
Thus you would be creating as many unique sounds as possible to be able to express the maximum number of meanings, which is why the earliest languages had a huge number of phonemes.
This doesn't really hold... there are limits to the human ability to produce sounds, and even more so there are limitations on distinctive sounds that can be recognized. For instance, the likelihood that a language will distinguish from a dental "t" and a alveolar "t" is almost nonexistent, as they sound so incredibly similar.
The likelihood is probably quite a bit higher than you realize. You need to study tonal and click languages - as they very well do much such distinctions.
The human brain/ear/tongue is incredible in what can be differentiated between and produced. A baby and toddler learn the language around them, and later (by teenage years) lose much of the ability to pick up other languages - primarily due to losing the ability to distinguish and produce the variances in the "new" language versus what they are using every day. (Yes, there are some people do not lose that ability, or at least lose it as greatly as others.)
Took me a while to figure out they meant in a band. I was wondering how they were going to jam some sort of signal with this codec.
Jamming a signal wouldn't be hard with any codec. You just have to broadcast the output on the right frequency with a sufficient power output. What you broadcast doesn't matter - whether it's the Linux Source code or the output of a codec. It's just the fact that you are actually broadcasting.;-)
I guess that's why there's so much noise and fury about desirable or undesirable features in languages -- some of the idioms used by one group are anti-patterns to another group, and, arguably, vice-versa. Presumably, the goals of OO are different as well -- is it to be used primarily to organize the code for clarity and maintainability, or is it to be used to maximize code reuse?
That's a huge issue with all language designs, and you can't please everybody.
But that's also the strength in C++ - it's flexibility, one reason it won't ever really go away, same with C. Both meet the needs of their users and their targeted environments in exceptional manners that no other language matches. Nothing else is as flexible to do different styles as most languages typically enforce a design style on their programmers.
As to your question, I'd probably argue both. Code needs to be maintainable, and easily read. Any one programmer is never going to be the sole programmer of a project - especially in a proprietary software organization; someone is going to have to pick it up at some point. Arguably the best approach to clarity and maintainability also maximizes code-reuse.
So for example, what I showed above while it may pass a "type" flag, that's perfectly okay. It maximizes code reuse by centralizing a function on a structure (a non-OO structure) and results in code that is both clear and maintainable. Now there is probably an OO-purest view that the structure should itself be wrapped in an OO-centric object and you only interact with that object; however, that leads to unnecessary overhead that results in (however slight) performance degradation.
Obviously I'm not an OO-purest - while I do a lot of C++, I probably use a lot more C. C++ just makes things easier to manage - especially function association, and variable scoping. And of course, no matter how much of an OO-purest you may be at some point you have to leave the OO world in order to do things like put data on the wire; it's just a matter of how many layers do you put in between - arguably the fewer the better per performance.
The point is primarily that it has to be part of the Interface class, available to all derived classes. While in this case, yes you are right there are likely very similar cases - e.g. such as where some a data structure is derived - where it may need to specify such.
For example, the interface class defines the functions void interface::toNetworkByteOrder(dataInterface& _data) and void interface::fromNetworkByteOrder(dataInterface& _data) as static. The derived classes must implement them with a static constraint. Note that the actual interformation is passed by reference; and may not necessarily be the class itself. In my prior example, I pass structures for various messages types that are not part of the class itself - though a class function does call the function the data is not stored as part of the class as its a parameter to the calling function.
I have a class that acts as a wrapper to all my network communications. Inside it, I have a small protocol - header information for everything sent; and a couple specialized messages for flow control on a per connection basis. I also have a number of specific data-type connections derived from that class. All these need to use that same protocol and header information per the system architecture. There are a series of functions that have no bearing on the specific class instances that are implemented in the main class that do things like network ordering of the structures, or converting certain kind of information. These functions are all static functions; all used by the derived classes, and are effectively part of the "Interface" being provided. This makes for a very nice, clean, and consistent set of interfaces - and makes it rather easy to add new ones too; and I don't need 5 layers to do it - 1 layer defines the interface.
So, OP is saying that these functions would now have to be non-static unless I went through quite a bit of trouble to hack my way around it and make them static.
Dalvik it NOT a JVM. The language is compatible enough that a JVM can be used for development, but the ultimate program is not a Java program.
This is evidenced by the fact that Google did not implement a number of the JVM interfaces required to make it actually Java.
Now, it could possibly be said that Dalvik is a derivative of Java - but no more so than Java is a derivative of C.
If, however, Dalvik was a JVM, then any program that runs on Dalvik would be able to run in any other JVM - including Oracle's reference platform. But that is not the case. Please stop espousing Oracle's FUD.
I'm more concerned with the moron who tries to pass off Intelligent Design, or Creationism as sound science, failing to display how they are testable, and falsifiable.
While I can't speak for Intelligent Design, Creationism is not thought of as Science period. Rather, it is an ideology behind how to choose ones assumptions when applied to Science. The fact that a Creationist Scientist chooses to use the assumption that the Earth is young enough to use one side of an equation (non-stable elements) when using Carbon Dating vs. a non-Creationist Scientist choosing to use the assumption that the Earth is old enough to use the other side of the equation (stable elements) is thereby evidenced; and has nothing to do with the validity of the Science behind it; just a different set of assumptions. Creationist Scientists - when allowed to be - are usually more up front about those assumptions too.
In other words, it's a challenge of the underlying assumptions behind the Science - assumptions that are not necessarily scientifically testable. (And yes, I'm aware of the various loops in the dating process; the above is just an example of how one might choose different assumptions. Nothing more.)
Ah right, so that's your beef. You're peeved that science doesn't agree with you and will come up with any rationalization to justify being right. Boring.
So then the only thing you're left to have a problem with is that we're also quite different from that distant ancestor. But we don't need "macro-evolution" to explain this. Many minor changes over many generations results in large changes. Which is even what the fossil record shows -- over time our ancestors became less like the ancient ape and more like us.
The Fossil Record does not show that. Thus the term "missing link" - there is no set to show that - just a hypothesis, and an unprovable one at that. We have as much DNA shared with the ape as we do a dolphin, mind you.
Looking only at the end-points, you see "macro-evolution". But in between, there's nothing but micro-evolution.
You only have a series of Micro-Evolution if you can indeed show and prove each step of the Micro-Evolution. There is not a large change between groups that we can do that for. Thus, they are not the same no matter how much you want to claim they are.
In science that's the minority and a failure of the established protocols. In religion it's the majority and the defining characteristic of how the system works.
And yes that is the norm in evolutionary sciences - accept anything as long as it does not contradict evolution; anything that does gets tossed out.
There are many religious organizations that would very much disagree with your perception of religion. Religious philosophy in Christianity alone uses a very iterative process, but it also allows people of opposing views. (The political structure does not necessarily, but that's the case in any realm, not simply religion.)
Micro- vs macro- evolution is a red herring, a canard. There is no actual difference. The mechanism is exactly the same. You can't say you're okay with one and not the other. That's just a trick to be able to say you don't believe in (macro-)evolution, yet still appear connected to reality. But it doesn't work.
Actually that is false. Micro-evolution is accepted more or less as described - minor changes the same species while Macro-evolution is defined as one species changing into another species - e.g. monkey evolving into homosapien. Macro-evolution has not been proven in a lab; only Micro-evolution.
Yes but that is doing things backwards. They are starting with a belief and then seeking to gather evidence for that belief, while ignoring any evidence that doesn't support their working hypothesis. None of those religions started as Christian and said, "whoops, you know what - check the Dead Sea Scrolls, we should be Jewish," and changed their beliefs to fit the evidence. The proceedings may well be logical and methodical, but it's all being done within an illogical framework of poor methodology. If you assume you already know the answer, then looking for supporting evidence is not an honest search for the truth; it's just counting how many people in the choir voted for singing.
Science is no different. You start with a hypothesis (belief), gather evidence for that hypothesis - and in some cases ignore data contrary to it (yes, it's happened), and then publish the results. Your peers then base their hypothesis on your results, and do the same - usually assuming that you have not doing anything you shouldn't, or if you have ultimately colluding with you towards your desired conclusion so long as it is the desired conclusion they want as well.
As must Darwinian evolution. While we can test and prove micro-evolution (adaptation and such), the same cannot be said for macro (one species to another). It is interesting how measuring rods are both dually convenient and inconvenient at the same time depending upon our preferences for what's being measure.
Macro vs micro evolution is a distinction made for convenience, not to represent any special difference between the two. Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
No, that's not necessarily true. That's an assumption, and one rather largely unproven. Thereby, it's not demonstrable and is therefore faith, not science.
That's the great thing about science -- using small things that we can observe to understand big things that we can't.
Your argument makes as much sense as saying that since we will probably never be able to watch a planet form up-close, we'll never understand how planet formation works. Who cares if we understand the basics (gravity, thermodynamics, radioactive decay, conservation of momentum), we haven't actually seen it so despite what we know, it must be magic.
For example, Newtonian Physics works great at the macro (every-day-object), slow-speed level. However, it substantially breaks down at the macro, high-speed and the micro levels. Einstein improved this with special relativity, though it still breaks down at the sub-micro levels, where Quantum mechanics fine tune from there using vastly different equations - different enough it cannot be reconciled (yet) with Newtonian and Einsteinian Physics. Yet, we wouldn't know that there is any break down of the Newtonian Physics without demonstrating it, the same goes for Einsteinian Physics.
Fact is, Macro Evolution has not been proven by any scientific means. Extrapolating it from Micro-Evolution is not valid science as it may not work or work any where near what we expect - which we won't know until we try to replicate it and succeed for fail.
Now for part of the kicker - Micro-Evolution has been shown to be temporary in many cases. Things "evolve" to meet a need, and as soon as the need is no longer they revert back. This has been shown time and time again - example: check out any of the examples used by Darwin to demonstrate Micro-Evolution; they all reverted after a time. All within his lifetime nonetheless.
Open Source is quite compatible with Christianity; specifically, it has a strong semblance with the early church (pre-Catholic Church). From Acts 2:42-47:
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
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The argument that it was "natural" was that it is relative to parts of the human body. 1 inch is typically the width of a man's thumb, and 1ft is typically the length of his foot. 2.54 cm is just an awkward number in the same respect. And yes, I often estimate by using my thumb or foot. For instance, when we were looking at houses, I would often check room sizes by stepping them out.
Or you just mark off the two end points, and then use your own foot to mark about where each post should go. Good enough for government work, and no other tools or calculations necessary - calculator or pen/pencil.
That said, there is nothing prohibiting you from having 2/3rds of an inch. Some tools (e.g. nuts, bolts, etc.) may not measure that way, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't have that in a drawing or anything else. If need be, you just round as appropriate.
The Fahrenheit scale in particular is extremely good for weather in most of the world, much better than C. 10 degrees F seems to roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people (60-cool, 70-just right, 80-warm, 90-hot).
That's just because you are usede to it. Look, at a conversion rate of 5/9 you get 10 degrees F roughly equal to 5 degres C. Which makes 5 degrees C roughly correlate to a unit of comfort for most people -- which really seems no more onerous.
You need to understand your conversion correctly. It's not simply a conversion of 5/9, you there is also a change in the relation to freezing - +/- 32 depending on the conversion direction. 10 degrees F is roughly -12.2 degrees C.
If you code GM Lan, Ford or J1939 you will notice that everything is metric. We then convert to english system to please the ignorant masses. There is no issues with other countries, everything is metric until you display stuff. What I found amusing is when I coded a cluster for a Daimler Engine communication was J1587 which is all english system. Daimler is from Germany for those who do not know. In our Electronic designs everything is metric.
Basically everything is metric except on the surface. The politicians don't have the balls to tell the morons that it would be wise to adapt. There were large opposition when the change was made in Canada, when you talk about degrees Farenheit they give you looks like you are some kind of weird alien.
May be not; but not always. The car companies - all of them - went through at least a period when they were using both metric and imperial. So you'd pull out the metric set, and start working on to find part way through that a bolt was actually imperial; next time you'd pull out the imperial set, find the reverse. Eventually you just start pulling out both sets. True on both my old 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis (aka Ford Crown Victoria, Lincoln Town Car) and my parent's 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager. I'll find out soon if that it is still true on my 2005 Mazda3 (haven't done much work on it yet) and 2010 Dodge Grand Caravan.
And that's the other side of the problem - Americans are use to working with both units on the same devices. Cooking, on the other hand, is a different issue as everyone is primarily use to either (i) cooking by feel (e.g. little or no measurements at all) or (ii) cooking by strict recipe in which nearly all recipes are 100% imperial units.
Road signs are in miles, beer comes in pints (proper ones, too, none of this 473ml rubbish) but that's it, officially speaking; packaging and so forth is all in metric. Obviously there are plenty of people who still think in Imperial, and strangely much more so than most other countries I've visited (maybe just that I have more experience with older British people, maybe it was more ingrained; it's not something I've though a lot about), but in terms of official business the change has long since succeeded, and in terms of public perception it crawls further towards metric with every generation. For what it's worth, I'm from the UK and when you say 'gallon' my brain says 'about 4 litres'.
Not quite. Their railroad system is in Miles+Chains namely due to the fact that Chains were the old surveyors tool so to keep everything tracking they still use 'em.
Price comparison is not done in 'liters' or 'milliliters' but in 'ounces'. Check the labels at the grocery store.
My laptop, my phone, and my tablet should all just be viewports and ways of interacting with one homogenous device. They should all be integrated parts of a whole.
To that end, I do not care which thing has which feature. I just care that I can seamlessly access the Internet no matter where I am.
So you want a Motorola Atrix. It's available. Pricey, but available.
As a human being with a mind and a means to communicate its thoughts, you can always make new content. That's the point of copyright law. To make you creative, instead of letting you just steal someone else's work.
As the AC's have pointed out, that may be the intent of Copyright Law, but the massive media companies - Sony, Disney, RIAA, MPAA, etc - have all subverted it to protect their monopolies from ever going into the public domain. They actively work to extend copyright terms to prevent people from using things that they created nearly 100 years ago. Mickey Mouse first debuted in the 1920's - but Disney will have to be dissolved as a company before they'll let Mickey or any of their other characters enter the public domain.
The irony is, the same rules apply to them. So it also limits what materials they can use to create new materials without breaking Copyright Law. Not that that has stopped them mind you - they (Disney at least) have actively stolen materials and modified "just enough" to get around Copyright Law when licensing negotiations have broken down in their opinion.
They've pushed so hard to make Copyright law so strong in order to enforce their monopolies forever on their own content that they've excluded themselves from being able to get a hold of new content at reasonable prices in reasonable time frames, thus inhibiting their ability to make new works. Ironic, no?
This is plausible, IMO, if their internal network is configured to disallow all incoming connections, but allows outgoing HTTP/HTTPS connections via a proxy (who can live without the Internets in this age?). You can't exploit services remotely, because the ports are being blocked, so the only strategies left is to either bring the virus into the network via USB (i.e. infect the entire country and hope that someone will bring it to the internal network), trick someone to download and install it (which is difficult when you don't know who has access to the network) or attack the actual firewall (fat chance, plus the IDS would raise red flags, assuming it could detect malicious packets). As soon as the virus gets in, it could easily make requests to a server in Texas via the proxy.
Secured networks do not allow Internet access period. It's called a one-way gateway. Data can go one direction, but it cannot return. Thus, data from a lower security network can get to a higher security network, but it cannot go vice versa. So again, it wouldn't be able to get to the Internet from where it was doing the damage even if the networks were connected.
The simplest possible spoken language would be a single phoneme per meaning, correct?
Only if one limited it strictly to vowels, and syllabic consonants. Vowel distinction is incredibly hard, and typically in the range of 3 to maybe 10 pure vowels at most. The naive thoughts about what would be "simple" in a language is getting in the way here.
True. There are generally at least 3 major language families: tonal (e.g. Thai), click (e.g. Aborigine), and phonetic (e.g English). Now the majority of the world is primarily phonetic languages, and these split up into numerous categories. I'm not familiar enough with tonal and click languages to say how the break down; but they are primarily centralized in regions of Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Though you also have to define a vowel. Not every language necessarily considers the same thing a vowel; so that could very. One language I'm working on for series treats 'c', 'p', and 's' as a vowel - it's got the 5 common vowels, plus about 4 or 5 functionary vowels that I can think of off the top of my head; over 30 letters in the primary alphabet.
Thus the number of meanings, or words, you can produce are restricted to the number of phonemes sounds that can be physically produced.
Theoretically yes... but the vast array of phonemes in languages cannot exist all on their own, and require "carrier" signals upon which to be formed. The carrier signals are vowels, and the bumps and hisses around them are the consonants and typically carry the most amount of phonemic distinction.
Except tonal and click languages don't necessarily have vowels and consonants. For example, in Thai you can say a complete sentence with the same phonetic sound by simply variant the pitch (tone). But then, vowels and consonants are more for written language than spoken - so (again) definitions are a must.
Thus you would be creating as many unique sounds as possible to be able to express the maximum number of meanings, which is why the earliest languages had a huge number of phonemes.
This doesn't really hold... there are limits to the human ability to produce sounds, and even more so there are limitations on distinctive sounds that can be recognized. For instance, the likelihood that a language will distinguish from a dental "t" and a alveolar "t" is almost nonexistent, as they sound so incredibly similar.
The likelihood is probably quite a bit higher than you realize. You need to study tonal and click languages - as they very well do much such distinctions. The human brain/ear/tongue is incredible in what can be differentiated between and produced. A baby and toddler learn the language around them, and later (by teenage years) lose much of the ability to pick up other languages - primarily due to losing the ability to distinguish and produce the variances in the "new" language versus what they are using every day. (Yes, there are some people do not lose that ability, or at least lose it as greatly as others.)
and remote jamming
Took me a while to figure out they meant in a band. I was wondering how they were going to jam some sort of signal with this codec.
Jamming a signal wouldn't be hard with any codec. You just have to broadcast the output on the right frequency with a sufficient power output. What you broadcast doesn't matter - whether it's the Linux Source code or the output of a codec. It's just the fact that you are actually broadcasting. ;-)
That's a huge issue with all language designs, and you can't please everybody.
But that's also the strength in C++ - it's flexibility, one reason it won't ever really go away, same with C. Both meet the needs of their users and their targeted environments in exceptional manners that no other language matches. Nothing else is as flexible to do different styles as most languages typically enforce a design style on their programmers.
As to your question, I'd probably argue both. Code needs to be maintainable, and easily read. Any one programmer is never going to be the sole programmer of a project - especially in a proprietary software organization; someone is going to have to pick it up at some point. Arguably the best approach to clarity and maintainability also maximizes code-reuse.
So for example, what I showed above while it may pass a "type" flag, that's perfectly okay. It maximizes code reuse by centralizing a function on a structure (a non-OO structure) and results in code that is both clear and maintainable. Now there is probably an OO-purest view that the structure should itself be wrapped in an OO-centric object and you only interact with that object; however, that leads to unnecessary overhead that results in (however slight) performance degradation.
Obviously I'm not an OO-purest - while I do a lot of C++, I probably use a lot more C. C++ just makes things easier to manage - especially function association, and variable scoping. And of course, no matter how much of an OO-purest you may be at some point you have to leave the OO world in order to do things like put data on the wire; it's just a matter of how many layers do you put in between - arguably the fewer the better per performance.
For example, the interface class defines the functions void interface::toNetworkByteOrder(dataInterface& _data) and void interface::fromNetworkByteOrder(dataInterface& _data) as static. The derived classes must implement them with a static constraint. Note that the actual interformation is passed by reference; and may not necessarily be the class itself. In my prior example, I pass structures for various messages types that are not part of the class itself - though a class function does call the function the data is not stored as part of the class as its a parameter to the calling function.
Example:
Here's on from a layering I recently did.
I have a class that acts as a wrapper to all my network communications. Inside it, I have a small protocol - header information for everything sent; and a couple specialized messages for flow control on a per connection basis. I also have a number of specific data-type connections derived from that class. All these need to use that same protocol and header information per the system architecture. There are a series of functions that have no bearing on the specific class instances that are implemented in the main class that do things like network ordering of the structures, or converting certain kind of information. These functions are all static functions; all used by the derived classes, and are effectively part of the "Interface" being provided. This makes for a very nice, clean, and consistent set of interfaces - and makes it rather easy to add new ones too; and I don't need 5 layers to do it - 1 layer defines the interface.
So, OP is saying that these functions would now have to be non-static unless I went through quite a bit of trouble to hack my way around it and make them static.
Dalvik it NOT a JVM. The language is compatible enough that a JVM can be used for development, but the ultimate program is not a Java program.
This is evidenced by the fact that Google did not implement a number of the JVM interfaces required to make it actually Java.
Now, it could possibly be said that Dalvik is a derivative of Java - but no more so than Java is a derivative of C.
If, however, Dalvik was a JVM, then any program that runs on Dalvik would be able to run in any other JVM - including Oracle's reference platform. But that is not the case. Please stop espousing Oracle's FUD.
I'm more concerned with the moron who tries to pass off Intelligent Design, or Creationism as sound science, failing to display how they are testable, and falsifiable.
While I can't speak for Intelligent Design, Creationism is not thought of as Science period. Rather, it is an ideology behind how to choose ones assumptions when applied to Science. The fact that a Creationist Scientist chooses to use the assumption that the Earth is young enough to use one side of an equation (non-stable elements) when using Carbon Dating vs. a non-Creationist Scientist choosing to use the assumption that the Earth is old enough to use the other side of the equation (stable elements) is thereby evidenced; and has nothing to do with the validity of the Science behind it; just a different set of assumptions. Creationist Scientists - when allowed to be - are usually more up front about those assumptions too. In other words, it's a challenge of the underlying assumptions behind the Science - assumptions that are not necessarily scientifically testable. (And yes, I'm aware of the various loops in the dating process; the above is just an example of how one might choose different assumptions. Nothing more.)
Here, here. Wish I could give you some mod points.
no but when you are working with objects it is cumbersome to have to write into unchecked string.
Then you're doing it wrong.
No. And I'll leave it at that.
The Fossil Record does not show that. Thus the term "missing link" - there is no set to show that - just a hypothesis, and an unprovable one at that. We have as much DNA shared with the ape as we do a dolphin, mind you.
You only have a series of Micro-Evolution if you can indeed show and prove each step of the Micro-Evolution. There is not a large change between groups that we can do that for. Thus, they are not the same no matter how much you want to claim they are.
Yes it is.
In science that's the minority and a failure of the established protocols. In religion it's the majority and the defining characteristic of how the system works.
And yes that is the norm in evolutionary sciences - accept anything as long as it does not contradict evolution; anything that does gets tossed out.
There are many religious organizations that would very much disagree with your perception of religion. Religious philosophy in Christianity alone uses a very iterative process, but it also allows people of opposing views. (The political structure does not necessarily, but that's the case in any realm, not simply religion.)
Actually that is false. Micro-evolution is accepted more or less as described - minor changes the same species while Macro-evolution is defined as one species changing into another species - e.g. monkey evolving into homosapien. Macro-evolution has not been proven in a lab; only Micro-evolution.
Yes but that is doing things backwards. They are starting with a belief and then seeking to gather evidence for that belief, while ignoring any evidence that doesn't support their working hypothesis. None of those religions started as Christian and said, "whoops, you know what - check the Dead Sea Scrolls, we should be Jewish," and changed their beliefs to fit the evidence. The proceedings may well be logical and methodical, but it's all being done within an illogical framework of poor methodology. If you assume you already know the answer, then looking for supporting evidence is not an honest search for the truth; it's just counting how many people in the choir voted for singing.
Science is no different. You start with a hypothesis (belief), gather evidence for that hypothesis - and in some cases ignore data contrary to it (yes, it's happened), and then publish the results. Your peers then base their hypothesis on your results, and do the same - usually assuming that you have not doing anything you shouldn't, or if you have ultimately colluding with you towards your desired conclusion so long as it is the desired conclusion they want as well.
As must Darwinian evolution. While we can test and prove micro-evolution (adaptation and such), the same cannot be said for macro (one species to another). It is interesting how measuring rods are both dually convenient and inconvenient at the same time depending upon our preferences for what's being measure.
Macro vs micro evolution is a distinction made for convenience, not to represent any special difference between the two. Macro and micro evolution are the same thing on different time scales, and if one works, the other has to.
No, that's not necessarily true. That's an assumption, and one rather largely unproven. Thereby, it's not demonstrable and is therefore faith, not science.
That's the great thing about science -- using small things that we can observe to understand big things that we can't.
Your argument makes as much sense as saying that since we will probably never be able to watch a planet form up-close, we'll never understand how planet formation works. Who cares if we understand the basics (gravity, thermodynamics, radioactive decay, conservation of momentum), we haven't actually seen it so despite what we know, it must be magic.
For example, Newtonian Physics works great at the macro (every-day-object), slow-speed level. However, it substantially breaks down at the macro, high-speed and the micro levels. Einstein improved this with special relativity, though it still breaks down at the sub-micro levels, where Quantum mechanics fine tune from there using vastly different equations - different enough it cannot be reconciled (yet) with Newtonian and Einsteinian Physics. Yet, we wouldn't know that there is any break down of the Newtonian Physics without demonstrating it, the same goes for Einsteinian Physics.
Fact is, Macro Evolution has not been proven by any scientific means. Extrapolating it from Micro-Evolution is not valid science as it may not work or work any where near what we expect - which we won't know until we try to replicate it and succeed for fail.
Now for part of the kicker - Micro-Evolution has been shown to be temporary in many cases. Things "evolve" to meet a need, and as soon as the need is no longer they revert back. This has been shown time and time again - example: check out any of the examples used by Darwin to demonstrate Micro-Evolution; they all reverted after a time. All within his lifetime nonetheless.
(Emphasis added)