I beleive that many of the "organic farms" considered in that article would not count as "small organic farms". So the claim of the gp could still be correct. I have personally seen a place run using what it called "French Intensive" that was quite productive, though I don't have any figures on just how productive. It was also quite labor intensive, so the comments about cost deserve SERIOUS consideration. I estimate that organic farms, with enough labor, can be more productive than current factory farms. However, the cost in terms of labor would be extremely high. Note that these methods are not used by commercial organic farms, with the possible exception of a few urban farms that have gourmet restaurants for customers.
I, personally, prefer to eat organic food. Not by a large margin, but I have a definite preference. This is largely because I don't trust the vendors and users of agricultural chemicals to have my interests at the forefront of their goals. And because multiple chemicals, each of which is provided at a "safe dosage", have been shown to react with each other to intensify the effects. And this is not tested for when setting the "safe limits". (This kind of interaction is known to be one factor in the continuing decimation of amphibian populations.)
With regards to the last comment: Not all genetic modifications are the same. The "RoundUp Ready" corn hasn't been on the market all that long.
Many of the other criticisms seem a lot more valid, and need to be aswered. This doesn't mean that he's wrong, but it doesn't appear that he's proven that he's right. (Maybe he has, and the material just hasn't been published yet. Maybe he hasn't. You can't really tell.)
So as of now it's an interesting report, but not something that can be taken as proven.
P.S.: I'm not an expert in this field either, being mainly a programmer. I did have a major in statistics, but I haven't even looked at his work, and if I did I wouldn't trust my stale (several decades since used) knowledge. But that last comment is either silly or biased. Since no attribution is given, and you admit to ignorance in the field, I suspect silly. But it could be read as having come from professor Tester, in which case I would consider it biased propaganda.
Not really. It's not *totally* unexpected, and it's certainly not a good bill of health. (Though I notice some are reading it that way.)
One important consideration for other spills is that the Gulf is a relatively benign environment as far as hydrocarbon eating bacteria are concerned. In a colder environment, the response would be, at best, much slower. And notice that around half is still left. And it's not a random half, it''s preferentially the hydrocarbons that the bacteria found harder to eat.
IIRC, in the Valdez spill recovery was a lot slower, but much of the oil degraded and buried itself in the bottom and under rocks, so people didn't tend to notice it. Free swimming life, IIRC, rebounded fairly well, be benthic life didn't fare nearly as well. So oil that isn't quickly accounted for tends to become a persistent low-grade poison...that doesn't much affect fish, but affects sessile life forms, like mussles, and (probably) seaweed.
OTOH, my summary isn't based on close reading of an indepth study, but on remembered stories over a period of several years, so some features may be wrong. (And if it didn't make the popular science press, I didn't read it.)
OTOH, there are definitely improper speeds. My idea is that there should be a floating tax rate on stock transactions, that increases with the speed of the transaction. I think it should hit 100% at around a microsecond, and 0% at 5-20 years, and scale logrithmicly in between. (OTOH, linearly would be simpler to understand and implement, so maybe that would be better.)
Perhaps linearly is the correct answer, since if you are doing fast trading, the taxes would be cumulative, so there would automatically be a compounding to cause you to avoid them.
N.B.: I'm allowing you to trade at any speed you desire. But I'm giving investment a real advantage over gambling.
I understand what you want "free market" to mean, but point me to a standardly accepted dictionary that has that as it's first meaning. Generally the term is created by combining the meanings of its two parts. Free meaning unconstrained, and market meaning a place where people go to buy and sell things. So that's the most common understanding of the term. Special meanings (e.g., what Adam Smith meant) require a lot more study and so are not the most commonly used meaning.
Another example of this is the meaning of the term "hacker". Those who write code will never convince most people that their meaning of the term is the correct one, even though it is historically prior. The dirivation is reasonable, but too obscure for most people to ever have encountered it, so most people analogize it to hacking with a sword or and axe. (Appropriately enough, as an axe was the original implement used by the hackers who made furniture.) But without an in-depth understanding (easy enough to get, but NOT what people would think of automatically) one gets a totally different metaphor, and thus a different basic meaning.
Sorry, but some of the rules they support allow companies to sue people for accurately describing the products being sold. So hypocrites is what they are.
Actually, no, it wouldn't. If, of course, such a thing could exist. There have, in history, been some close approximations. At one point Athens had a market that was nearly free. About it the Emperor of the Persians said "Who are these people who have special places where they go to cheat each other?". But if you outraged too many of your neighbors, you could be banished from Athens for a decade. (There were probably some other rules, like "You can't rob your customers at the point of a knife.", but I don't know what they were.)
FWIW: 1) Unrestricted would mean no prohibition on fraud. 2) Unregulated would mean that those who obeyed rules to avoid fraud would be penalized in comparison to those who broke those same rules.
OTOH, I don't trust the government, either. This leaves me sort of betwixt and between. Both the large corporations and the government are essentially powers that I cannot fight. If either is given free reign, then my life will turn into slavery, or possibly just abject poverty. The government is less interested in impoverishing me, and possibly less interested in enslaving me....except as a favor to their corporate supporters.
I find it quite impossible to support either side. For now, all I can hope is that the powers-that-be start feuding. This will keep anything good from getting accomplished, but it also prevents anything bad from getting accomplished. Unfortunately, the last decade has shown that the two sides are able to agree on accomplishing evil, even when they can't agree on doing anything good.
What the should do is just block all searches that refer to her. No editorial distinction between whether it lauds her or scorns her. Just mention her is enough.
FWIW, a granparent or so complained that the space program was as underfunded as education. I.e., our priorities are such that the most important future leaning activities are underfunded (or so I understood it).
OTOH, I'm not convinced that orbit is such a great place to build things until AFTER we have captured an asteroid, or build a catapult on the moon. There's no materials there to build from, and lofting everything from Earth is rediculously expensive. I suppose a space elevator could solve this, but building that won't happen until long after space is reasonably used. So my favorite skyhook is a thing called a pinwheel. Much cheaper, much easier, quite flexible. And much safer. It's true that it also doesn't reduce costs as much, and like any skyhook, you need to bring down as much mass as you lift up, or the orbit decays.
Moon bases are a good idea because the moon is a decent place to set up a catapult to get mass into orbit. (But you still need to work on a closed ecology. This use it once and thow it away is ok for ammunition, but lousy for a base. Especially for air and water. (For a base use it once can be construed to mean for several decades, so use it once isn't so bad. But for the air you breathe or the water you drink, it's not such a good approach. Or for the food you eat.) If we don't improve the "closed ecology" capabilities, then space exploration will clearly be the province only of robots.
Possibly it's unfair, but I *do* blame Gnome3 and KDE4 for Linux having a problem. I, at least, find those window managers unusable, where Gnome2 was acceptable, and KDE3 was superior. So I'm currently running LXDE, and being rather unhappy. I don't really know how many of my problems are directly the fault of the desktop, but it's clearly much less friendly than was Gnome2, and Gnome2 was less friendly than KDE3. I keep hoping that Trinity will reach a usable level. (I'm guessing that they had to rename a bunch of libraries, as I don't know what other reason could be holding them back. Certainly Mate has/had that problem. Maybe Mate [or Cinnamon] will be ready before Trinity, but Trinity would be a better final state.)
So currently I can't write to my printer, though I can scan from it. It might be the window manager, or it might be something related to Debian testing. I should test with another window manager, but I haven't yet. Debian stable was a much better choice for me, with Gnome2 as the desktop. But it couldn't scan from the printer. Whoops!. So for now, I scan from my current computer, but if I want to print, I email it to my wife, and she prints it oul. This is hardly a good endorsement.
The annoying thing is that a few months ago I could both scan and print from Debian...not sure whether it was testing or stable, but it was the same printer. Something changed at some point, but I scan and print so rarely, that I can't figure out when.
For every particular publisher, the publisher needs Amazon more than Amazon needs that particular publisher. So only if the publishers band together can the bargain with Amazon on an even approximately level basis. When workers do it, it's called a union.
Unfortunately, when companies have done this in the past it has been as a conspiracy against the public. So laws got passed to prohibit them from acting in this way. In this particular case, it looks as if the law is badly conceived. Usually, however, this kind of law is not only needed, but needs to be applied much more vigorously than it usually is. The goal is for bargains to be made that are fair to all participants, which requires a level playing field. This is quite difficult to achieve. Particularly when the legislators are generally beholden to some group of "more powerful players" who don't really want to bargain on a level basis.
The advantage of virtual machines is that they are simpler and more regular. 7094 assembler would have similar virtues, but nobody has a machine to run the code on anymore. (Actuall, if you get into I/O, 7094 assembler also loses the "simpler and more regular" advantage.)
As for need... The need is to teach logical thinking. This is something that's quite difficult to do if there's no ready test of correctness. Programming offers such a test. So does electrical engineering with separate components. (Leave transistors out of the elementary version. Diodes and triodes are, however, ok. Transistors require fancier math to handle properly. Integrated circuits hide the basic features under a mask, and present a complex interface.) But Electrical engineering is about a lot more than just thinking properly. Something can fail to work because you didn't solder a connection properly. Programming is more purely about thinking properly. I can see an argument that one should do all the basic programming using "not", "and", "nor" etc., but that's really too limiting to be interesting. If you're working at that level, a game to play tic-tac-toe would be a semester project. That's for more advanced students that really want to get into the details. And Lisp has never been popular. Most people just don't readily think that way. Ditto for Forth. (Forth is in interesting mixture of assembler and high level language, but that's not enough to recommend it as an introductory language.)
So I picked a selection of languages that make it easy and quick to get interesting results, and that can be done in a way that skips most of the underlying details. And a virtual machine assembler to give one the idea of what the underlying details are like. NOT to do much work in. But a simplified environment. The 8086 was too complex, and it's descendants have not only kept the complexity, they've increased it. If the dominant CPU had been the Motorola 68000, then I might not have felt so strongly that one should use a virtual machine rather than an actual assembler. That was a CPU with a fairly regular language. That said, I must admit that I don't know what the modern assemblers are like. Perhaps with an increasing address space, and 64-bit words, they have returned to a more regular and orthogonal assembler code. But if so, I haven't heard so.
I'm sorry, but we disagree. The problem is structural. Removing one set of people and replacing them with another, while leaving the structure the same would at best be a temporary fix. Often the first generation of regulators are not corrupted. But given the structure, those who replace them tend to be either corrupt or corruptible. I give ICANN as a recent clear example.
You can say that the structure is not itself evil, and that is a reasonable linguistic quibble. But as long as the regulators are human, it remains merely a quibble, and not a useful one.
To say that "capitalism itself is inherently evil" is to overstate the case, but it certainly has very strong leanings in that directions, and unless closely regulated by an *independant* regulator it quickly becomes evil. The problem is that the regulators are usually captured by those that they are intended to regulate, i.e., a separation of powers is not properly effected. Such priviledge escalations ARE evil, and quickly lead those who are regulated to also become nearly as evil as they would be if not regulated.
It's not really a buffer overflow priviledge escalation, it's more like classes with methods that should be private being marked public. But given the current regulatory setup, I have to conclude that capitalism is not only evil, it's becoming increasingly evil. This also shows what needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, it doesn't reveal how to fix it. (Well, I can identify how one could design appropriate separation, but having the design doesn't tell me how to implement it.)
It should NOT include C. Pointers are an abomination. Perhaps it should include assembly programming of some virtual machine. Preferably one designed to be easy to program. MIXX and Parrot come to mind.
It should not include Java, because I don't trust Oracle. Python might be a good choice, or Ruby. Perhaps Squeak. (Note that these are all garbage collected, and have a long history of fairly stable implementation.) Only after a couple of years of that would I even consider C or C++. Perhaps by then Java will be freed from Oracle. (I know it's GPL, and that's a pretty strong protection, but it clearly doesn't stop a company like Oracle from suing you. They lost against Google, but Google had pretty deep pockets. And you can't depend on a sensible judge and jury.)
Excellent. But I would only make programming available AFTER the completion of a 1st year algebra class. It doesn't need to be postponed any longer than that, and certain proto-programming courses (e.g. in Scratch from MIT) might be made available as simple week long electives before then. Fitting this kind of thing into the school year, however, would be a real problem. And I don't think a full semester, or quarter, or whatever elementary schools are now running on, would be appropriate.
Without checking Google, I assume you're trying to influence me with bafflegab. I don't rate this as highly probably, but I give it at least a 45% probability.
Checking Google, but not following the links, it looks like some sort of voltage regulator. But I didn't follow the links, so I don't know if it would blow like a fuse if the voltage goes over 6.2 volts or not.
If you've got the right skill set to be an entrepreneur, it's unlikely you'll be a developer. And conversely. That developers aren't well rewarded is a commentary about society as much as about the individuals that choose to be developers. I'll admit, however, that it *is* a commentary about both.
OTOH, most middle management jobs have even less of a future than do developers. Automation is rapidly advancing on them, at the same time that it's slowly advancing on developers. Top management is only safe because they're unlikely to declare themselves obsolete, not because they have a more comprehensive skill set. (In fact I expect there to be corporations that don't have any real management except the board of directors within the next 15 years. And within 5 years after that many of the BOD will be figureheads that vote as directed by an AI.)
Still, I will admit that my timescale could be a bit off. It might be 20 & 5 instead of 15 & 5.
But being a developer is a very different skill set than being a developer. Very few individuals have ever been successful at both. In fact Linus Tolvards is as close as I can come to an example. (And I *don't* count Bill Gates as an example. He was definitely an entrepreneur, but to me it appears that he skill as a developer is all PR and "theft". [I'm willing to concede that I have no evidence that he actually broke any laws. So theft is in quotes.])
I don't think you understand how complex Lego can get. But I'll admit I'm not sure anyone ever made a Lego Universal Turing Machine. But I wouldn't be surprised.
I wish I could believe that. Unfortunately, the government generally, and law enforcement officials more specificly, have a WORSE track record for telling the truth than does J. Random Hacker.
If I go strictly by probabilities, I'd believe Antisec. But I happen to feel that it's OK to remain undecided.
P.S.: Saying "Antisec needs to provide more proof" is not reasonable. If they have tapped something, an incomplete result is to be expected. (I.e., if they intercepted communications in process rather than hacking the computer.) Saying that you won't believe then would be a bit better, but without expressing what additional evidence would convince you, not much better.
For that matter, I'm not sure what either side could do to convince me that they were telling the truth, but I don't count a simple assertion as worth even considering. Especially not from the govt., which has a horrible track record of lying even when the truth would be to its advantage.
I'd proof this better, but the combination of slashcode with firefox makes proofreading a painful process.
Actually, I don't overestimate the average human. I consider all human drivers unsafe. I consider myself unsafe enough that I yanked my own license. But I expect that we will hold the machines to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That's how it usually works.
IIRC, turn signals became mandatory within about a decade after they were allowed. This isn't quite the same, so I give it 20-30 years to become mandatory on local roads, as well as on freeways. Whether that's within your lifetime or not I wouldn't choose to guess.
Slashdot Mirror
I beleive that many of the "organic farms" considered in that article would not count as "small organic farms". So the claim of the gp could still be correct. I have personally seen a place run using what it called "French Intensive" that was quite productive, though I don't have any figures on just how productive. It was also quite labor intensive, so the comments about cost deserve SERIOUS consideration. I estimate that organic farms, with enough labor, can be more productive than current factory farms. However, the cost in terms of labor would be extremely high. Note that these methods are not used by commercial organic farms, with the possible exception of a few urban farms that have gourmet restaurants for customers.
I, personally, prefer to eat organic food. Not by a large margin, but I have a definite preference. This is largely because I don't trust the vendors and users of agricultural chemicals to have my interests at the forefront of their goals. And because multiple chemicals, each of which is provided at a "safe dosage", have been shown to react with each other to intensify the effects. And this is not tested for when setting the "safe limits". (This kind of interaction is known to be one factor in the continuing decimation of amphibian populations.)
With regards to the last comment:
Not all genetic modifications are the same. The "RoundUp Ready" corn hasn't been on the market all that long.
Many of the other criticisms seem a lot more valid, and need to be aswered. This doesn't mean that he's wrong, but it doesn't appear that he's proven that he's right. (Maybe he has, and the material just hasn't been published yet. Maybe he hasn't. You can't really tell.)
So as of now it's an interesting report, but not something that can be taken as proven.
P.S.: I'm not an expert in this field either, being mainly a programmer. I did have a major in statistics, but I haven't even looked at his work, and if I did I wouldn't trust my stale (several decades since used) knowledge. But that last comment is either silly or biased. Since no attribution is given, and you admit to ignorance in the field, I suspect silly. But it could be read as having come from professor Tester, in which case I would consider it biased propaganda.
Not really. It's not *totally* unexpected, and it's certainly not a good bill of health. (Though I notice some are reading it that way.)
One important consideration for other spills is that the Gulf is a relatively benign environment as far as hydrocarbon eating bacteria are concerned. In a colder environment, the response would be, at best, much slower. And notice that around half is still left. And it's not a random half, it''s preferentially the hydrocarbons that the bacteria found harder to eat.
IIRC, in the Valdez spill recovery was a lot slower, but much of the oil degraded and buried itself in the bottom and under rocks, so people didn't tend to notice it. Free swimming life, IIRC, rebounded fairly well, be benthic life didn't fare nearly as well. So oil that isn't quickly accounted for tends to become a persistent low-grade poison...that doesn't much affect fish, but affects sessile life forms, like mussles, and (probably) seaweed.
OTOH, my summary isn't based on close reading of an indepth study, but on remembered stories over a period of several years, so some features may be wrong. (And if it didn't make the popular science press, I didn't read it.)
The thing is, there's no proper speed. None.
OTOH, there are definitely improper speeds. My idea is that there should be a floating tax rate on stock transactions, that increases with the speed of the transaction. I think it should hit 100% at around a microsecond, and 0% at 5-20 years, and scale logrithmicly in between. (OTOH, linearly would be simpler to understand and implement, so maybe that would be better.)
Perhaps linearly is the correct answer, since if you are doing fast trading, the taxes would be cumulative, so there would automatically be a compounding to cause you to avoid them.
N.B.: I'm allowing you to trade at any speed you desire. But I'm giving investment a real advantage over gambling.
I understand what you want "free market" to mean, but point me to a standardly accepted dictionary that has that as it's first meaning. Generally the term is created by combining the meanings of its two parts. Free meaning unconstrained, and market meaning a place where people go to buy and sell things. So that's the most common understanding of the term. Special meanings (e.g., what Adam Smith meant) require a lot more study and so are not the most commonly used meaning.
Another example of this is the meaning of the term "hacker". Those who write code will never convince most people that their meaning of the term is the correct one, even though it is historically prior. The dirivation is reasonable, but too obscure for most people to ever have encountered it, so most people analogize it to hacking with a sword or and axe. (Appropriately enough, as an axe was the original implement used by the hackers who made furniture.) But without an in-depth understanding (easy enough to get, but NOT what people would think of automatically) one gets a totally different metaphor, and thus a different basic meaning.
Sorry, but some of the rules they support allow companies to sue people for accurately describing the products being sold. So hypocrites is what they are.
Actually, no, it wouldn't. If, of course, such a thing could exist. There have, in history, been some close approximations. At one point Athens had a market that was nearly free. About it the Emperor of the Persians said "Who are these people who have special places where they go to cheat each other?". But if you outraged too many of your neighbors, you could be banished from Athens for a decade. (There were probably some other rules, like "You can't rob your customers at the point of a knife.", but I don't know what they were.)
FWIW:
1) Unrestricted would mean no prohibition on fraud.
2) Unregulated would mean that those who obeyed rules to avoid fraud would be penalized in comparison to those who broke those same rules.
OTOH, I don't trust the government, either. This leaves me sort of betwixt and between. Both the large corporations and the government are essentially powers that I cannot fight. If either is given free reign, then my life will turn into slavery, or possibly just abject poverty. The government is less interested in impoverishing me, and possibly less interested in enslaving me....except as a favor to their corporate supporters.
I find it quite impossible to support either side. For now, all I can hope is that the powers-that-be start feuding. This will keep anything good from getting accomplished, but it also prevents anything bad from getting accomplished. Unfortunately, the last decade has shown that the two sides are able to agree on accomplishing evil, even when they can't agree on doing anything good.
According to the official UN definition of terrorist, only a non-state actor can be a terrorist. So FEMA is off the hook.
What the should do is just block all searches that refer to her. No editorial distinction between whether it lauds her or scorns her. Just mention her is enough.
FWIW, a granparent or so complained that the space program was as underfunded as education. I.e., our priorities are such that the most important future leaning activities are underfunded (or so I understood it).
OTOH, I'm not convinced that orbit is such a great place to build things until AFTER we have captured an asteroid, or build a catapult on the moon. There's no materials there to build from, and lofting everything from Earth is rediculously expensive. I suppose a space elevator could solve this, but building that won't happen until long after space is reasonably used. So my favorite skyhook is a thing called a pinwheel. Much cheaper, much easier, quite flexible. And much safer. It's true that it also doesn't reduce costs as much, and like any skyhook, you need to bring down as much mass as you lift up, or the orbit decays.
Moon bases are a good idea because the moon is a decent place to set up a catapult to get mass into orbit. (But you still need to work on a closed ecology. This use it once and thow it away is ok for ammunition, but lousy for a base. Especially for air and water. (For a base use it once can be construed to mean for several decades, so use it once isn't so bad. But for the air you breathe or the water you drink, it's not such a good approach. Or for the food you eat.) If we don't improve the "closed ecology" capabilities, then space exploration will clearly be the province only of robots.
Sounds likt it's time to try Trinity again.
I forget exactly why I decided to remove SUSE... Next time I do a disk partition, maybe I should reserve some space for them.
Possibly it's unfair, but I *do* blame Gnome3 and KDE4 for Linux having a problem. I, at least, find those window managers unusable, where Gnome2 was acceptable, and KDE3 was superior. So I'm currently running LXDE, and being rather unhappy. I don't really know how many of my problems are directly the fault of the desktop, but it's clearly much less friendly than was Gnome2, and Gnome2 was less friendly than KDE3. I keep hoping that Trinity will reach a usable level. (I'm guessing that they had to rename a bunch of libraries, as I don't know what other reason could be holding them back. Certainly Mate has/had that problem. Maybe Mate [or Cinnamon] will be ready before Trinity, but Trinity would be a better final state.)
So currently I can't write to my printer, though I can scan from it. It might be the window manager, or it might be something related to Debian testing. I should test with another window manager, but I haven't yet. Debian stable was a much better choice for me, with Gnome2 as the desktop. But it couldn't scan from the printer. Whoops!. So for now, I scan from my current computer, but if I want to print, I email it to my wife, and she prints it oul. This is hardly a good endorsement.
The annoying thing is that a few months ago I could both scan and print from Debian...not sure whether it was testing or stable, but it was the same printer. Something changed at some point, but I scan and print so rarely, that I can't figure out when.
For every particular publisher, the publisher needs Amazon more than Amazon needs that particular publisher. So only if the publishers band together can the bargain with Amazon on an even approximately level basis. When workers do it, it's called a union.
Unfortunately, when companies have done this in the past it has been as a conspiracy against the public. So laws got passed to prohibit them from acting in this way. In this particular case, it looks as if the law is badly conceived. Usually, however, this kind of law is not only needed, but needs to be applied much more vigorously than it usually is. The goal is for bargains to be made that are fair to all participants, which requires a level playing field. This is quite difficult to achieve. Particularly when the legislators are generally beholden to some group of "more powerful players" who don't really want to bargain on a level basis.
The advantage of virtual machines is that they are simpler and more regular. 7094 assembler would have similar virtues, but nobody has a machine to run the code on anymore. (Actuall, if you get into I/O, 7094 assembler also loses the "simpler and more regular" advantage.)
As for need... The need is to teach logical thinking. This is something that's quite difficult to do if there's no ready test of correctness. Programming offers such a test. So does electrical engineering with separate components. (Leave transistors out of the elementary version. Diodes and triodes are, however, ok. Transistors require fancier math to handle properly. Integrated circuits hide the basic features under a mask, and present a complex interface.) But Electrical engineering is about a lot more than just thinking properly. Something can fail to work because you didn't solder a connection properly. Programming is more purely about thinking properly. I can see an argument that one should do all the basic programming using "not", "and", "nor" etc., but that's really too limiting to be interesting. If you're working at that level, a game to play tic-tac-toe would be a semester project. That's for more advanced students that really want to get into the details. And Lisp has never been popular. Most people just don't readily think that way. Ditto for Forth. (Forth is in interesting mixture of assembler and high level language, but that's not enough to recommend it as an introductory language.)
So I picked a selection of languages that make it easy and quick to get interesting results, and that can be done in a way that skips most of the underlying details. And a virtual machine assembler to give one the idea of what the underlying details are like. NOT to do much work in. But a simplified environment. The 8086 was too complex, and it's descendants have not only kept the complexity, they've increased it. If the dominant CPU had been the Motorola 68000, then I might not have felt so strongly that one should use a virtual machine rather than an actual assembler. That was a CPU with a fairly regular language. That said, I must admit that I don't know what the modern assemblers are like. Perhaps with an increasing address space, and 64-bit words, they have returned to a more regular and orthogonal assembler code. But if so, I haven't heard so.
I'm sorry, but we disagree. The problem is structural. Removing one set of people and replacing them with another, while leaving the structure the same would at best be a temporary fix. Often the first generation of regulators are not corrupted. But given the structure, those who replace them tend to be either corrupt or corruptible. I give ICANN as a recent clear example.
You can say that the structure is not itself evil, and that is a reasonable linguistic quibble. But as long as the regulators are human, it remains merely a quibble, and not a useful one.
To say that "capitalism itself is inherently evil" is to overstate the case, but it certainly has very strong leanings in that directions, and unless closely regulated by an *independant* regulator it quickly becomes evil. The problem is that the regulators are usually captured by those that they are intended to regulate, i.e., a separation of powers is not properly effected. Such priviledge escalations ARE evil, and quickly lead those who are regulated to also become nearly as evil as they would be if not regulated.
It's not really a buffer overflow priviledge escalation, it's more like classes with methods that should be private being marked public. But given the current regulatory setup, I have to conclude that capitalism is not only evil, it's becoming increasingly evil. This also shows what needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, it doesn't reveal how to fix it. (Well, I can identify how one could design appropriate separation, but having the design doesn't tell me how to implement it.)
It should NOT include C. Pointers are an abomination. Perhaps it should include assembly programming of some virtual machine. Preferably one designed to be easy to program. MIXX and Parrot come to mind.
It should not include Java, because I don't trust Oracle. Python might be a good choice, or Ruby. Perhaps Squeak. (Note that these are all garbage collected, and have a long history of fairly stable implementation.) Only after a couple of years of that would I even consider C or C++. Perhaps by then Java will be freed from Oracle. (I know it's GPL, and that's a pretty strong protection, but it clearly doesn't stop a company like Oracle from suing you. They lost against Google, but Google had pretty deep pockets. And you can't depend on a sensible judge and jury.)
Excellent. But I would only make programming available AFTER the completion of a 1st year algebra class. It doesn't need to be postponed any longer than that, and certain proto-programming courses (e.g. in Scratch from MIT) might be made available as simple week long electives before then. Fitting this kind of thing into the school year, however, would be a real problem. And I don't think a full semester, or quarter, or whatever elementary schools are now running on, would be appropriate.
Without checking Google, I assume you're trying to influence me with bafflegab. I don't rate this as highly probably, but I give it at least a 45% probability.
Checking Google, but not following the links, it looks like some sort of voltage regulator. But I didn't follow the links, so I don't know if it would blow like a fuse if the voltage goes over 6.2 volts or not.
If you've got the right skill set to be an entrepreneur, it's unlikely you'll be a developer. And conversely. That developers aren't well rewarded is a commentary about society as much as about the individuals that choose to be developers. I'll admit, however, that it *is* a commentary about both.
OTOH, most middle management jobs have even less of a future than do developers. Automation is rapidly advancing on them, at the same time that it's slowly advancing on developers. Top management is only safe because they're unlikely to declare themselves obsolete, not because they have a more comprehensive skill set. (In fact I expect there to be corporations that don't have any real management except the board of directors within the next 15 years. And within 5 years after that many of the BOD will be figureheads that vote as directed by an AI.)
Still, I will admit that my timescale could be a bit off. It might be 20 & 5 instead of 15 & 5.
But being a developer is a very different skill set than being a developer. Very few individuals have ever been successful at both. In fact Linus Tolvards is as close as I can come to an example. (And I *don't* count Bill Gates as an example. He was definitely an entrepreneur, but to me it appears that he skill as a developer is all PR and "theft". [I'm willing to concede that I have no evidence that he actually broke any laws. So theft is in quotes.])
I don't think you understand how complex Lego can get. But I'll admit I'm not sure anyone ever made a Lego Universal Turing Machine. But I wouldn't be surprised.
I wish I could believe that. Unfortunately, the government generally, and law enforcement officials more specificly, have a WORSE track record for telling the truth than does J. Random Hacker.
If I go strictly by probabilities, I'd believe Antisec. But I happen to feel that it's OK to remain undecided.
P.S.: Saying "Antisec needs to provide more proof" is not reasonable. If they have tapped something, an incomplete result is to be expected. (I.e., if they intercepted communications in process rather than hacking the computer.) Saying that you won't believe then would be a bit better, but without expressing what additional evidence would convince you, not much better.
For that matter, I'm not sure what either side could do to convince me that they were telling the truth, but I don't count a simple assertion as worth even considering. Especially not from the govt., which has a horrible track record of lying even when the truth would be to its advantage.
I'd proof this better, but the combination of slashcode with firefox makes proofreading a painful process.
Actually, I don't overestimate the average human. I consider all human drivers unsafe. I consider myself unsafe enough that I yanked my own license. But I expect that we will hold the machines to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That's how it usually works.
IIRC, turn signals became mandatory within about a decade after they were allowed. This isn't quite the same, so I give it 20-30 years to become mandatory on local roads, as well as on freeways. Whether that's within your lifetime or not I wouldn't choose to guess.