Although I will chip in the "not there yet" camp, but I will add that the failure states of humans vs robots is different. Problems in robotics are systematic, certain circumstances lead to failure states. Something that needs to be understood and remedied through the application of refined and extended techniques. Current technology allows autonomous driving in a well maintained car on a well maintained road with fair weather (lane assist + adaptive cruise control + forward sign and light recognition). It is perceivable that engineers will overcome the remaining problems in around a decade.
Although humans are able to adapt to many unforeseen conditions, it does not mean they are actually good in all conditions. This added with a high variance of individual skill. This makes that, under conditions that robots perform optimally they will do so consistently, individual humans may not. In the long run I will trust robots more than humans.
In addition, car manufacturers have a relative solid record when it comes to integrating computers into cars. Think about it almost all cars sold today are drive by wire. If you can trust a computer to reliably and consistently apply your throttle input into acceleration and switch gears for you, there is no reason why you should not trust a computer to drive your car, once the sensor technology is sufficiently developed.
I don't get it. I have seen the health care system in the US(before obamacare), France, Germany and the US (now with obamacare) and can conclude, socialized health care is always cheaper. Free market self corrects* many things, but health care is not one of them. For example in Germany, I am above the highest income bracket and I pay less than I would in the US. That is less than when I would be single, but I am not my insurance covers my child and wife. You may pay less, because you are young, but wait until you are older.
* In the case of healthcare there is no free market, it is an inelastic market. If there is treatment that can save your life, no mater if it costs $7 or $70000 you will find the money to pay for it. As a result normal free market dynamics do not apply. With socialized healthcare the insurances negotiate on your behalf and they have leverage because the span the entire population or large parts. They pit different providers against each other, which reintroduces free market forces.
I think we are VERY FAR from robots that really autonomously make a kill decision. This is the basic AI fallacy that imply that we will soon have systems that can "decide on their own". But that will probably happen never or not very soon.
You need to look at real practical implementations of weapon systems (i.e. killer robots). Any weapon system will be integrated into the command and control structure of the army. The system will have different operational modes (simplified), such as stand down, engage specific target, engage all non friends and engage everything that moves. The key here is a robust friend / foe detection systems, something that is already almost perfectly solved for aircraft. Sure you could try integrate an effort to include combatant / civilian detection mode, but since that can probably be easily fooled, it will be an optional feature that will be disabled once the enemy tries to fool it.
This philosophical pondering "can a robot make a kill/no kill decision" is as you point out meaningless, since humans can not make this decision either reliably. The real question is, can we design a robust friend / foe system? That is a solvable engineering problem.
On what is there exactly consensus? That the climate is changing? That pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on the climate? That is the only thing they can agree on. But even then consensus is meaningless. If there is no "consensus" on the nature of the universe, why do we need consensus in climate science?
The things that they can agree on are the obvious things. The climate is changing, as is obvious if you look at an aggregate of historical weather data. Pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on climate, is simple physics a rise from 300ppm to 600ppm has approximately 1.2K rise in temperature. Most skeptics also agree to these basic facts, since anything else would be nonsense.
The things that climate scientists don't agree on are the how feedback mechanisms behave exactly and on how to model them. The IPCC report aggregates multiple models that are widely all over the place. That is why we get predictions all over the place ranging from +6K (catastrophic) to +3K (mild) (300ppm - 600ppm). In addition to the seemingly inability to actually predict the climate. The current slump was totally not predicted, let us hope that the revised models fare better.
When divergent hypotheses (e.g. cosmic rays) are denied publication, because "consensus", then we really have a problem. Divergent hypotheses should be published and discredited based on data and peer review and not clout of the professors favoring the leading theory. The current state of scientific publishing is somewhat broken, where conflict of interest is not money, but possibility of loosing face. That there even was this half bogus* 97% report and that it keeps being parroted over and over tells you almost all you need to know.
* half bogus, because the sample and sample size where very biased. It's like asking if Windows is awesome on the Build conference.
Except that you are missing the fact that a nuclear battery is not the same think like a nuclear reactor. You can build a nuclear battery with something around a cup full of material, whereas a nuclear reactor needs a significant larger amount of material. Also it is funny how you mention Fukushima, the health effects in this incident where rather minor. There are chemical industrial accidents with significant higher casualty rates than that. If you mentioned Chernobyl you may have had a point, but not with Fukushima.
As far as I remember the North Sea has some of the highest tidal sway. Granted looking at this table Denmark comes at to low end, but 1-2m tidal sway is not a little bit of water moving, especially if the topology is rather flat.
First there are limited provisions AND the police does not only operate open in public space. Probably most of the juicy bits are taken on private property, such as during an arrest.
I rather doubt that people will actually react to electric prices changing. Unless there are discernible and predictable patterns most people will not notice a change in the price. Even if there is a big fat indicator of the current price visible, do you really think people will turn of the TV and turn down the heating?
Having batteries at home still makes a lot of sense because you can charge them up at night when demand is low and electricity is cheap
Except that with a high solar power capacity in the network, it tends to be inverted. At night little capacity is available and the price tends to go up and at daytime with high capacity the price tends to go down. The good news is that basic demand follows the same curve as solar capacity over a day. The tricky times are during dusk, dawn and early evening, where you still have relative high demand but little capacity. Then again, I don't think solar power (fotovolatic) is a good idea.
You know bio diesel exists? Just use that as a fallback with ye olde diesel generator. I see totally no reason why infrastructure should collapse in a blackout without fossil fuels. Now there are good and valid concerns why you don't want to use wide scale bio diesel use, for example in cars, but that does not mean you can't use it as an energy buffer for critical infrastructure. Batteries are almost never a good idea, they are expensive and quite nefarious for the environment when at their end of life. You only really want/need batteries as a buffer until the generator kicked in.
This is Denmark, yes? You know, the country that is surrounded by oceans that have some of the strongest tides? I think Denmark could produce almost all of it's power though tidal power plants. The only real trick is how to buffer the power during the lull of high and low tide.
You are mostly correct solar (fotovoltaic) is a dumb idea, but there are more renewable power sources than solar and wind.
Except for a few superfluous platitudes you appear to have no real clue. Now I don't really claim to know what gamer gate is about, but I know that in the current situation both (extreme) sides are up their ass and the TFA is more part of the problem than the solution.
I don't really have an investment in either side, I don't care much, but I saw what happened first hand from day one. To refresh your mind this all started with the "five guys" post. In this post Zoe Quinn was accused to having affairs with 5 different guys while in a relationship with the posts' author. The reason why people started talking about the issue was, that at least two people where closely related to gaming press. Honestly I was not very surprised in general, since I assumed that the some game developers where figuratively in bed with the press, that this instance it appears that this literally is almost meaningless. Nevertheless few people went ballistic about it, this partially because of previous polarized debate surrounding depression quest.
But what came next was unprecedented and actually eclipses any ethical issues surrounding Zoe. During the first day many mysteries surrounded the issue, maybe the "fives guys" post was not correct, who knows. People started to talk about the issue, some reasoned, some less reasoned and suddenly all discussion was suppressed. Entire subredits where deleted any thread on 4chan about the issue was deleted and banns where handed out generously. This pattern permeate many gaming forums. But the starkest was the disruption of 4chan, a place where racism and chauvinism is part of the community's makeup and the response not, "you can't say that, they can be nice people" but "U dimwitted retard" or Spiderman. When even reasoned debate is silenced, something wrong. As it turned out there was collusion between the sites and any moderator that disagreed was culled. That day 2/3 of 4chan's and a large number redit moderators where shown the door, simply for not suppression the topic.
Honestly would it not have been for the attempt at suppressing discussion, the issue with zoe would probably be mostly forgotten. But the real shit storm happened after the rather failed attempt at suppression. The suppression was fuel to the fire and granted the more radical elements started to become unpleasantness. (I don't support their actions, but I understand where they came from.) At the same time suddenly "feminist" voices where starting to get heard that gamer gate was a concerted effort to drive women out of gaming. At the time it made absolutely no sense. (It still doesn't, but at least it started to look plausible.) That suddenly many game journalism sites started to run articles "anti gamer", like the "Gamers are Dead" article definitely did not diffuse the situation.
I don't know where we can go from here. Harassment never was OK, but that applies to both sides. (No you don't get a "tone argument" free pass.) I will continue to mostly ignore the entire issue and continue to have fun playing games. Ignoring the trolls is almost always the best solution, no matter what banner they appear to be waving.
I would rather put it an other way, if you only hear one side of the story and you can't really be bothered to research the subject, why should you have an other opinion? Do you know how boring most news is? The special problem in the US is that it appears that there is collusion between news sources. In most western countries there are multiple news sources, yes they all push an agenda to a certain degree, but they are in competition. In addition a well informed individual will look at multiple news sources from different countries. But in the US, unless you really go out of your way you will not get different points of view, because the same point of view will be parroted over and over. Most people do not want to spend that mental effort...
Do not require or are designed to not require a high number of objects? If I get a dollar for each time a designer or artist bitches about them reaching the polygon/object budget, I would be rich. If you would let them they would cram the levels and geometries full of stuff and most gamers would love it. The reality is that the scenes are carefully designed to not tank. Granted More's law has helped, but more efficient code will always make people happy. But if your script code just sits around an waits for it's next tick, you cam make it inefficient, but you will bitch if your collision test takes "forever".
Actually it gets worse, the good employees leave, the bad stay. The result is that the total workforce degrades and the boss is probably non the wiser.
The problem here is that as a hiring manager or even an engineer you have very little to go on. No everybody is allowed the luxury of a Google style interview where a candidate if tested for an entire day. It already has been shown that the picture on a CV has more influence than the CV itself. (That is why many states have a no picture rule for CVs.) The same thing repeats in the job interview, how the person behaves and looks is way more influential than any skill he/she/it shows. In the end most hiring decisions are done based on gut feeling. The problem with gut feeling is that it is discriminatory, you have a strong bias towards liking same as you. As a person hiring someone you need to actively try to tear down your biases, to make the best over all decision. But that is really difficult.
I honestly think that what they bring to the table is their cultural background, not their gender or race. If you take a team of all white males age 20 - 25, who grew up all around the world, you will get better results than a group of white males ages 20 - 25 from California. If the design team of Assassins Creed would have had more women in key positions, maybe they would have noticed having a female playable character is a good idea, before the game was released. The same goes to design bureaus that make wonderful looking glass stairs.
Basically it depends. Speed is not "that important", but number of physics enabled objects on screen are. And here is the corundum, you can probably control and render a huge number of objects in say JavaScript, but never actually simulate them. The result is that the physics kernel is written in C/C++ and maybe brought into a scripting language via an API. Also the rendering core (OpenGL/Direct X) or database are written in C/C++, since they need to be fast. Your assertion is correct, high level application code often is not the critical path in performance. But low level components are, databases, drivers or simulation packages, and these are written in a language that compiles natively. But then again, there is a high chance that you are not developing one of these low level components.
Would you feel better if you replaced "abstract base class" with "interface"? I will immediately accepts that non abstract multiple inheritance is a feature that you can do without; like goto. But the actual problem is not simple multiple inheritance, that is quite simple to reconcile, but the moment the inheritance graph forms a diamond. (Do you have tow "instances" of the base class or only one?) But the use of single inheritance and multiple ABC's is no different than the use of interfaces in C# or Java. Then again, I think inheritance is THE over used feature in C++.
Honestly I think the culture an community surrounding the language has way more influence on quality than actual language features. Take languages like C, C++ or Perl. They they where born during a time where people actually designed software and mostly knew what they where doing. Although Perl is more gung ho than C, but the design is clear, be simple and don't get in my way, I know what I am doing. The average developer is more rigorous, but the language lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
In contrast take languages like Ruby or Python, where you are booed out of the room when you don't have unit tests. This has the perversion where unit tests are written for trivial tasks or in way that is totally ineffective, but YOU CANT'T PROGRAM WITHOUT TESTS. Here the quality comes mostly through process that is indoctrinated in the community. The programmers don't pay much attention to what they are actually doing, if it does not trip a test, all is well.
JavaScript for example a difficult one. JavaScript in the browser is mostly "I can programz, YOLO", like PHP it was born in a community of hobbyists with very little quality control. Their awesome utility made them the center of an industry and as developers from other fields came into the industry the community slowly stated adapting more rigor towards design and quality. Here the quality can be all over the place. In contrast JavaScript in the context of node.js, is totally different. Node.js came to a certain degree from web developers communities, like ruby on rails, they for example took the unit testing rigor with them.
As I noted, the community and culture in which the language is used, is probably the dominant indicator.
Because, there is no market it for it where people can pay exorbitant amounts for it. The dying people are penniless.
The people may be, but the countries hosting them are not.Even if they are cash strapped the world bank will love to approve a credit for them, for a small fee, so that they can pay for ebola vaccines. The customers are not the affected individuals, but their country.
Except that in this case, if I understand correctly, you get the flue. Granted the flu is better than ebola, but this vaccine is not side effect free. It makes sense to administer it to people heading into the affected regions, but not a general purpose vaccine.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I will chip in the "not there yet" camp, but I will add that the failure states of humans vs robots is different. Problems in robotics are systematic, certain circumstances lead to failure states. Something that needs to be understood and remedied through the application of refined and extended techniques. Current technology allows autonomous driving in a well maintained car on a well maintained road with fair weather (lane assist + adaptive cruise control + forward sign and light recognition). It is perceivable that engineers will overcome the remaining problems in around a decade.
Although humans are able to adapt to many unforeseen conditions, it does not mean they are actually good in all conditions. This added with a high variance of individual skill. This makes that, under conditions that robots perform optimally they will do so consistently, individual humans may not. In the long run I will trust robots more than humans.
In addition, car manufacturers have a relative solid record when it comes to integrating computers into cars. Think about it almost all cars sold today are drive by wire. If you can trust a computer to reliably and consistently apply your throttle input into acceleration and switch gears for you, there is no reason why you should not trust a computer to drive your car, once the sensor technology is sufficiently developed.
So you think the NSA can not get a certificate issued from Verisign for any domain?
I don't get it. I have seen the health care system in the US(before obamacare), France, Germany and the US (now with obamacare) and can conclude, socialized health care is always cheaper. Free market self corrects* many things, but health care is not one of them. For example in Germany, I am above the highest income bracket and I pay less than I would in the US. That is less than when I would be single, but I am not my insurance covers my child and wife. You may pay less, because you are young, but wait until you are older.
* In the case of healthcare there is no free market, it is an inelastic market. If there is treatment that can save your life, no mater if it costs $7 or $70000 you will find the money to pay for it. As a result normal free market dynamics do not apply. With socialized healthcare the insurances negotiate on your behalf and they have leverage because the span the entire population or large parts. They pit different providers against each other, which reintroduces free market forces.
I think we are VERY FAR from robots that really autonomously make a kill decision. This is the basic AI fallacy that imply that we will soon have systems that can "decide on their own". But that will probably happen never or not very soon.
You need to look at real practical implementations of weapon systems (i.e. killer robots). Any weapon system will be integrated into the command and control structure of the army. The system will have different operational modes (simplified), such as stand down, engage specific target, engage all non friends and engage everything that moves. The key here is a robust friend / foe detection systems, something that is already almost perfectly solved for aircraft. Sure you could try integrate an effort to include combatant / civilian detection mode, but since that can probably be easily fooled, it will be an optional feature that will be disabled once the enemy tries to fool it.
This philosophical pondering "can a robot make a kill/no kill decision" is as you point out meaningless, since humans can not make this decision either reliably. The real question is, can we design a robust friend / foe system? That is a solvable engineering problem.
On what is there exactly consensus? That the climate is changing? That pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on the climate? That is the only thing they can agree on. But even then consensus is meaningless. If there is no "consensus" on the nature of the universe, why do we need consensus in climate science?
The things that they can agree on are the obvious things. The climate is changing, as is obvious if you look at an aggregate of historical weather data. Pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on climate, is simple physics a rise from 300ppm to 600ppm has approximately 1.2K rise in temperature. Most skeptics also agree to these basic facts, since anything else would be nonsense.
The things that climate scientists don't agree on are the how feedback mechanisms behave exactly and on how to model them. The IPCC report aggregates multiple models that are widely all over the place. That is why we get predictions all over the place ranging from +6K (catastrophic) to +3K (mild) (300ppm - 600ppm). In addition to the seemingly inability to actually predict the climate. The current slump was totally not predicted, let us hope that the revised models fare better.
When divergent hypotheses (e.g. cosmic rays) are denied publication, because "consensus", then we really have a problem. Divergent hypotheses should be published and discredited based on data and peer review and not clout of the professors favoring the leading theory. The current state of scientific publishing is somewhat broken, where conflict of interest is not money, but possibility of loosing face. That there even was this half bogus* 97% report and that it keeps being parroted over and over tells you almost all you need to know.
* half bogus, because the sample and sample size where very biased. It's like asking if Windows is awesome on the Build conference.
Except that you are missing the fact that a nuclear battery is not the same think like a nuclear reactor. You can build a nuclear battery with something around a cup full of material, whereas a nuclear reactor needs a significant larger amount of material. Also it is funny how you mention Fukushima, the health effects in this incident where rather minor. There are chemical industrial accidents with significant higher casualty rates than that. If you mentioned Chernobyl you may have had a point, but not with Fukushima.
As far as I remember the North Sea has some of the highest tidal sway. Granted looking at this table Denmark comes at to low end, but 1-2m tidal sway is not a little bit of water moving, especially if the topology is rather flat.
First there are limited provisions AND the police does not only operate open in public space. Probably most of the juicy bits are taken on private property, such as during an arrest.
I rather doubt that people will actually react to electric prices changing. Unless there are discernible and predictable patterns most people will not notice a change in the price. Even if there is a big fat indicator of the current price visible, do you really think people will turn of the TV and turn down the heating?
Having batteries at home still makes a lot of sense because you can charge them up at night when demand is low and electricity is cheap
Except that with a high solar power capacity in the network, it tends to be inverted. At night little capacity is available and the price tends to go up and at daytime with high capacity the price tends to go down. The good news is that basic demand follows the same curve as solar capacity over a day. The tricky times are during dusk, dawn and early evening, where you still have relative high demand but little capacity. Then again, I don't think solar power (fotovolatic) is a good idea.
You know bio diesel exists? Just use that as a fallback with ye olde diesel generator. I see totally no reason why infrastructure should collapse in a blackout without fossil fuels. Now there are good and valid concerns why you don't want to use wide scale bio diesel use, for example in cars, but that does not mean you can't use it as an energy buffer for critical infrastructure. Batteries are almost never a good idea, they are expensive and quite nefarious for the environment when at their end of life. You only really want/need batteries as a buffer until the generator kicked in.
This is Denmark, yes? You know, the country that is surrounded by oceans that have some of the strongest tides? I think Denmark could produce almost all of it's power though tidal power plants. The only real trick is how to buffer the power during the lull of high and low tide.
You are mostly correct solar (fotovoltaic) is a dumb idea, but there are more renewable power sources than solar and wind.
Except for a few superfluous platitudes you appear to have no real clue. Now I don't really claim to know what gamer gate is about, but I know that in the current situation both (extreme) sides are up their ass and the TFA is more part of the problem than the solution.
I don't really have an investment in either side, I don't care much, but I saw what happened first hand from day one. To refresh your mind this all started with the "five guys" post. In this post Zoe Quinn was accused to having affairs with 5 different guys while in a relationship with the posts' author. The reason why people started talking about the issue was, that at least two people where closely related to gaming press. Honestly I was not very surprised in general, since I assumed that the some game developers where figuratively in bed with the press, that this instance it appears that this literally is almost meaningless. Nevertheless few people went ballistic about it, this partially because of previous polarized debate surrounding depression quest.
But what came next was unprecedented and actually eclipses any ethical issues surrounding Zoe. During the first day many mysteries surrounded the issue, maybe the "fives guys" post was not correct, who knows. People started to talk about the issue, some reasoned, some less reasoned and suddenly all discussion was suppressed. Entire subredits where deleted any thread on 4chan about the issue was deleted and banns where handed out generously. This pattern permeate many gaming forums. But the starkest was the disruption of 4chan, a place where racism and chauvinism is part of the community's makeup and the response not, "you can't say that, they can be nice people" but "U dimwitted retard" or Spiderman. When even reasoned debate is silenced, something wrong. As it turned out there was collusion between the sites and any moderator that disagreed was culled. That day 2/3 of 4chan's and a large number redit moderators where shown the door, simply for not suppression the topic.
Honestly would it not have been for the attempt at suppressing discussion, the issue with zoe would probably be mostly forgotten. But the real shit storm happened after the rather failed attempt at suppression. The suppression was fuel to the fire and granted the more radical elements started to become unpleasantness. (I don't support their actions, but I understand where they came from.) At the same time suddenly "feminist" voices where starting to get heard that gamer gate was a concerted effort to drive women out of gaming. At the time it made absolutely no sense. (It still doesn't, but at least it started to look plausible.) That suddenly many game journalism sites started to run articles "anti gamer", like the "Gamers are Dead" article definitely did not diffuse the situation.
I don't know where we can go from here. Harassment never was OK, but that applies to both sides. (No you don't get a "tone argument" free pass.) I will continue to mostly ignore the entire issue and continue to have fun playing games. Ignoring the trolls is almost always the best solution, no matter what banner they appear to be waving.
Except... Drugs and Communism.
I would rather put it an other way, if you only hear one side of the story and you can't really be bothered to research the subject, why should you have an other opinion? Do you know how boring most news is? The special problem in the US is that it appears that there is collusion between news sources. In most western countries there are multiple news sources, yes they all push an agenda to a certain degree, but they are in competition. In addition a well informed individual will look at multiple news sources from different countries. But in the US, unless you really go out of your way you will not get different points of view, because the same point of view will be parroted over and over. Most people do not want to spend that mental effort...
Do not require or are designed to not require a high number of objects? If I get a dollar for each time a designer or artist bitches about them reaching the polygon/object budget, I would be rich. If you would let them they would cram the levels and geometries full of stuff and most gamers would love it. The reality is that the scenes are carefully designed to not tank. Granted More's law has helped, but more efficient code will always make people happy. But if your script code just sits around an waits for it's next tick, you cam make it inefficient, but you will bitch if your collision test takes "forever".
Actually it gets worse, the good employees leave, the bad stay. The result is that the total workforce degrades and the boss is probably non the wiser.
The problem here is that as a hiring manager or even an engineer you have very little to go on. No everybody is allowed the luxury of a Google style interview where a candidate if tested for an entire day. It already has been shown that the picture on a CV has more influence than the CV itself. (That is why many states have a no picture rule for CVs.) The same thing repeats in the job interview, how the person behaves and looks is way more influential than any skill he/she/it shows. In the end most hiring decisions are done based on gut feeling. The problem with gut feeling is that it is discriminatory, you have a strong bias towards liking same as you. As a person hiring someone you need to actively try to tear down your biases, to make the best over all decision. But that is really difficult.
I honestly think that what they bring to the table is their cultural background, not their gender or race. If you take a team of all white males age 20 - 25, who grew up all around the world, you will get better results than a group of white males ages 20 - 25 from California. If the design team of Assassins Creed would have had more women in key positions, maybe they would have noticed having a female playable character is a good idea, before the game was released. The same goes to design bureaus that make wonderful looking glass stairs.
Basically it depends. Speed is not "that important", but number of physics enabled objects on screen are. And here is the corundum, you can probably control and render a huge number of objects in say JavaScript, but never actually simulate them. The result is that the physics kernel is written in C/C++ and maybe brought into a scripting language via an API. Also the rendering core (OpenGL/Direct X) or database are written in C/C++, since they need to be fast. Your assertion is correct, high level application code often is not the critical path in performance. But low level components are, databases, drivers or simulation packages, and these are written in a language that compiles natively. But then again, there is a high chance that you are not developing one of these low level components.
Would you feel better if you replaced "abstract base class" with "interface"? I will immediately accepts that non abstract multiple inheritance is a feature that you can do without; like goto. But the actual problem is not simple multiple inheritance, that is quite simple to reconcile, but the moment the inheritance graph forms a diamond. (Do you have tow "instances" of the base class or only one?) But the use of single inheritance and multiple ABC's is no different than the use of interfaces in C# or Java. Then again, I think inheritance is THE over used feature in C++.
Honestly I think the culture an community surrounding the language has way more influence on quality than actual language features. Take languages like C, C++ or Perl. They they where born during a time where people actually designed software and mostly knew what they where doing. Although Perl is more gung ho than C, but the design is clear, be simple and don't get in my way, I know what I am doing. The average developer is more rigorous, but the language lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
In contrast take languages like Ruby or Python, where you are booed out of the room when you don't have unit tests. This has the perversion where unit tests are written for trivial tasks or in way that is totally ineffective, but YOU CANT'T PROGRAM WITHOUT TESTS. Here the quality comes mostly through process that is indoctrinated in the community. The programmers don't pay much attention to what they are actually doing, if it does not trip a test, all is well.
JavaScript for example a difficult one. JavaScript in the browser is mostly "I can programz, YOLO", like PHP it was born in a community of hobbyists with very little quality control. Their awesome utility made them the center of an industry and as developers from other fields came into the industry the community slowly stated adapting more rigor towards design and quality. Here the quality can be all over the place. In contrast JavaScript in the context of node.js, is totally different. Node.js came to a certain degree from web developers communities, like ruby on rails, they for example took the unit testing rigor with them.
As I noted, the community and culture in which the language is used, is probably the dominant indicator.
Because, there is no market it for it where people can pay exorbitant amounts for it. The dying people are penniless.
The people may be, but the countries hosting them are not.Even if they are cash strapped the world bank will love to approve a credit for them, for a small fee, so that they can pay for ebola vaccines. The customers are not the affected individuals, but their country.
Except that in this case, if I understand correctly, you get the flue. Granted the flu is better than ebola, but this vaccine is not side effect free. It makes sense to administer it to people heading into the affected regions, but not a general purpose vaccine.
Although you are correct, the GP's though came to my mind too. This is the classical into to a apocalypse movie.