I guess in some roundabout way it makes sense for things like CDs and MP3 player devices. But this is supposed to be a tax on memory cards! There's a very small fraction of these being used in mobile phones, and whatever is being used for music often got paid for, again, through iTunes and co..
The real large bulk of usage is other data on mobile phones, as well as use in cameras. Is the entire software industry being recompensated, too? And how is that large fraction of the price of especially the smaller memory cards appropriate when most usage is NOT for music?
This is almost obligatory. Part 30 shows some interesting things, though there are also quite a few of the other parts that are relevant. Get to know the Discovery Institute by video... if you want, feel free to also read about it on Wikipedia
Now, here's the more specifically likely source of this "null hypothesis" stuff, the flawed arguments by Dembski, another one of the former members of Discovery Institute.
The united nations is about avoiding disputes over commercial ventures. The UN should actually be the ones that "own" the solar system, because determining who does in the classic military fashion mankind settled such possible disputes in the past would be a very, very bad idea.
And the only large-ish space station that I know of that even fell even just partially uncontrolled actually hit the ground far from where it was supposed to go (Skylab). The bigger MIR was very carefully de-orbited - still debris hit the ground. You don't want to know what would have happened if someone actually tried to maximize rather than minimize the damage... or what would happen if the same was done with something of the size of ISS.
And really, some of these nations destroying some satellites (which in some cases doesn't even mean "completely shattered") does not at all mean they can deal with a space station or an asteroid with a slightly altered trajectory. Nor will things be fine until all nations can be protected.
I'd like UN regulation and control of all exploitation of space. If there can't be broad consensus over it should be used commercially, space should just remain unused. We can't afford quarrels over space.
Besides, until the nations of the world can defend themselves against, say, asteroids that may have their trajectories altered or falling space stations, it is also not at all clever to allow any particularly large or particularly maneuverable commercial venues out there.
Even with FOSS software you depend on others to maintain it. If they stop, then you don't get updates.
Wrong. You just don't get free updates anymore if others cease to maintain a piece of software, now you have to create additions or maintenance fixes by yourself.
Or, as is more realistic for most people and organizations, hire someone with skills matching the problem to do it. It is not like programmers -even fairly well-trained ones- are much more of a rarity or generally more expensive than doctors of matching skill. Plus, maybe your problem is one that doesn't even require skills like any kind of doctor. Add to that that some may be convinced to give you a discount, because open source work can be counted as "charitable", too.
If you don't get paid well enough for your contributions to the economy, that's a different story and should be addressed. But not by cheap fuel with all the side-effects, but just plain higher, more fair wages. Indirect solutions only get you screwed over.
This here is really just about petrol cars and their emissions. Emissions which have effects that provably accumulate a lot of varied damage all over society. The health costs alone are quite insane, but not the only cost.
It is damage which so far people would ignore, because doing anything individually does mainly just dents their own budget with no visible personal gain. Well, now you eventually might have to, and it makes sense for (almost) everyone if everyone drastically reduces or stops their emissions.
1. Obama does not withdraw from Iraq as fast as he promised to during his election campaign.
2. ???
3. The US attack Libya with the intent to get its oil - and not like before in trade, but occupation of sorts. Also implied: Libya exports to the US, not to the EU, China, and Turkey anymore as it did before.
If it turns into a "Serbian-style" conflict, then we'll be helping the wrong side yet again.
Assuming you're a citizen of a NATO member country, you were on the correct side. Both in the humanitarian sense (fighting the worst war criminals, even if combatants had a pretty shoddy record) and in the general sense (supporting a democracy or an authoritarian state - guess which is better)...
I also feel very strongly against this action. UN-sanctioned or no, it's a declaration of war
I disagree, the UN matters. It decides what is the law of nations, and whether and how to enforce it. We all know it is still law made by men, but in this case, it represents the overwhelming majority of humanity and a good part of its power, too. It should not be ignored, for both practical and moral reasons.
war of which we have plenty right now.
Hey, if you wanted to stay clear of this one, you could actually do so, the rest will likely somehow get the job done. But would you really want to start two wars that aren't exactly perceived as righteous, and then turn down one that mostly is?
This is a civil war. Ghaddafi keeps his revolutionary guard well-paid, and his military is more than he needs to maintain control. The UN forces will only prolong the fighting, and it's very difficult to convince the world that the no-fly action has nothing to do with the price of oil.
I don't think either applies. A few things about the actual fighting: There's no real way to take heavy equipment or even just cars or carts with supplies through the desert when superior planes and helicopters control the air. And the important cities are the ones at the coast. Guess who'll have superiority in either place, even if it were just France vs Libya?
About the Libyan oil: Really, there are probably economic motivations at work, but this idea seems far-fetched. The EU and US at least surely care more about not getting a rebel army worth of refugees, safe shipping channels through the mediterranean sea, and safe coastlines. Definitely not the comparatively small bit of oil that might be expensively exploited (the cost of paying for the security of the extraction effort, the cost of domestic protests against it all, etc.) instead of just bought in trade.
'Everything short of an invasion' is rhetoric. This is a declaration of war. It violates Libya's sovereignty. From here on in, its not a question of who is right and who is wrong. It is a question of who applies more force to subdue whom.[...]
I think you missed the part where member states, like Libya, explicitly agreed to various things the UN charter demands from members.
The UN is also not just some random faction subject to international law. No, it is essentially the international law, even though if its enforcement is only taken care of by willing volunteers.
With the intervention of western countries, do you think this resolution will influence further revolutions across the globe, fueled by the hope that the UN will come to the rescue if the targets of revolt become aggressors similar to Gadhafi?
I wouldn't advise anyone starting a revolution unless they realistically can win. As far as Libya is concerned, the world's most powerful factions are now quite convinced that Gadaffi and/or his forces are too insane, too brutal, too much going against their ideals and interests, and too close nearby, and the rest does not even disagree. Protecting people as described in the resolution is hence already very close to meaning the destruction Gadaffi's armies, so it may actually benefit the rebels decisively. But I don't think most other rebels can even be "too close nearby" or get many of these other things, at which point it may even be doubtful if anyone cares for them.
Isn't it interesting that social media and modern technology have done more for the desire for democratization than most of our cold-war efforts ever did?
Social media are helpful. But it took enormous steps for all of China, Russia, and the EU, even (in recent times especially) the US to get to where they are now. All social media wouldn't matter much otherwise, we would either already be at each other's throat, close to or entirely extinct, or actively preventing anyone from gaining prestige, territory, influence and anything. In the last case, what the rebels wanted wouldn't matter, they'd be just one more battlefield to fight on over entirely different issues, or be ignored.
[...]The point is that Stallman probably doesn't insist on full schematics for his microwave. He probably doesn't ask for the complete recipe for the TV dinner he's nuking. He probably doesn't tour the facility where the TV dinner (and/or microwave) was built. He probably doesn't check to make sure that the cows that were used to make the leather for his sneakers were free-range and humanely slaughtered.[...]
You actually can modify (fix or alter) your sneakers or microwave with not much more effort than the original producer. Looking at the components from the outside as they are will generally tell you exactly what they do, too. And here, unlike with software, an occasional surprise inspection and scrutiny of the equipment available and used in the industrial facilities and tests of samples is quite good to ensure animals get butchered humanely or that food is created according to a certain recipe.
But with software, you generally need all of the code, build instructions and documentation as well as access to the binary in order to meaningfully be able to either inspect or modify it. And evil can be done in the slightest fraction of it, generally without any good means of detection and with maybe only one programmer knowing that it was done.
What "smaller countries" vote on everything? Or in other words, what countries other than just Switzerland practice direct democracy regularly and systematically at the national level? I think there are none. The USA with its state-level ballot measures / ballot questions is probably the closest thing so far - at least until the EU possibly gets an practicable implementation of initiatives and referendums.
Anyways now to correct the other bit: The notion of direct democracy in Switzerland means that people can collect a percentage of the population's signatures -it is specified in absolute numbers, but saying it like this makes the point more obvious- to "forcibly" initiate a public vote on new laws, or (more easily) stop new laws passed by the government.
As you might guess, the "collect signatures" part very much limits the number of issues that actually will be voted on, and they only get voted on on the national level if it in fact is a nation-wide law that needs to be passed or undone- so no hindrance in practicing the same in the USA, really. They often are simply taken on consequential issues parliament has either not wanted to decide yet, or that parliament has decided wrongly or insufficiently. An example of what one issue that probably would not have dragged on for so long with the right to initiate a vote in the USA: Recompensating any 9/11 first responders for illnesses they may have contracted.
Apart from all that, specific kinds of laws, like changes in the constitution or specific areas of the law may also just simply require a public vote. Even parliament itself can initiate a public vote so they don't have to decide an issue... but you already know that from your own legal practice, except it never happens on the national level, as far as I can tell.
You forgot the amount of data that mankind wants to keep grows and no end is in sight, even if you consolidated data in a "cloud" with de-duplication and only a few copies for redundancy it would grow. One example everyone knows is how cameras and their produced files got larger and larger resolutions recently, that trend probably won't stop...
So, the need for data storage will keep growing and that data storage better be reasonably long-lived if you want to stay in business, because that is a primary feature for these devices for just about your entire customer base. Short-lived devices will degrade your reputation as a vendor rapidly and for a long time...
Well yes, they are a bit of a unnecessary luxury by now. We want information to be on the internet or our hard disk drives, in proper form for reading on many screen form factors and many OS's supported readers, printable and storable. If libraries could offer that, they could stay as very relevant as Wikipedia is.
Of course, the modern information access that is being demanded directly contradicts the business model of most copyright holders. Now the question is, which of these two is unsustainable... and I'll say it's the old copyright model, both because of the very excessive duration of protection (which by now ensures it never ever will benefit the living people who protect the copyright in the first place), as well as the very fact that it does not practically work in our society without various very ugly forms of restrictions in our own homes and on the internet to support it.
It is not the internet and free services that need fixing, but the laws regarding intellectual property.
You're being extremely generous. With the time it takes to publish something these days, 10 years total including renewal is more than enough motivation.
In fact, that may still be too generous. Even people who do their marketing themselves, inefficiently, for a rather niche audience, ought to recoup their money by that time if they wrote anything worth reading at all.
Yes! Yes, I can! Computer science and/or IT subjects are at least as badly off as maths. These, too, are usually taught as "training" not "education" by the definition of the original article. But usually they stop teaching you at the equivalent to addition in maths - most just teach people how to click buttons in MS Office.
An educated programmer (or other engineer) knows a lot both about technical feasibility and about customer wishes. An educated programmer will also often contradict the illusions of feasibility and usefulness that computer-uneducated marketing and management have. As information scientists & analysts, they even may have better education in parts of a management job than the mangers themselves.
So, that should by all means result in much more influence on the company than a graphical artist. Essentially, they often should be sitting on the same table and always on eye-level with even top-level management, because they are the only ones that really have a means to estimate feasibility and time/resource consumption on what's usually by far the most complex part of work in a product (and hence the largest risk), PLUS knowledge about customer wishes that management and marketing often does not have, PLUS an useful elevated ability to work with information in general which that enables them to -say- work out if a complex project schedule is realistic or not in a systematic fashion, PLUS they are amongst the hardest to replace if they leave a company.
Programmers don't obsolete management skills or marketing skills. But they are not used well at all -and your company will feel that just as badly as having a bad CEO- if they are only seen as the people who execute tasks as much as possible to the specifications by management or marketing, like graphic artists.
So what if you need a good idea, too? You still cannot get away with a good idea that is poorly implemented by engineers and scientists - it will also go exactly nowhere if there's any competition at all. Which there will be, unless you live in the US and can just patent the entire industry sector, that is. But we already knew that in the US, lawyers win.
Everywhere else where you don't work with a given monopoly, the mere fact of realizing non-trivial software is well over the head of badly trained programmers, and you will either never complete the software/product, or have a cripped product with drastically reduced specifications that comes at fourteen times over budget and ten times too late, is buggy, and will require massive efforts to adapt once you need it to work on a different computer / with some added functionality. Your potential customers will run for the competition or omit the use of any thing like this entirely, and that's the end of the story.
And ultimately, between having a good idea that is (in some way) feasible, and implementing it sufficiently well, the problem lies far more with the latter. That's the reason why -for instance- we don't have robots do all the manual labour for us yet, even in industry sectors where superficially similar production processes are already done by robots. We all already know that would be really nice and magnitudes of orders more efficient than any manual labour, but getting there is a slow and requires skilled workers that are not plentiful either on the software or on the hardware side of these engineering projects.
They should just make an unified display for the side & rear view, mounted very easily viewable near the forward view - presumably with three cameras, one mounted at the back of the car, two on the side. Merge the picture, put it on a display. A single look would then suffice to get a ~270 degree view - a nice panorama picture.
That would sure help to prevent at least a lot of those non-lethal accidents where people bump into another due to not perfectly checking all views, driving on objects backwards that are low'ish on the ground or missing the timing between checking the rear and side view or whatever...
Nah. You forget that the EU and Japan and Australia and many more are also still in this boat, and they will not at all dismantle democracy because China exists or grows. And the US not being so influential anymore does not have to be a bad thing - it will just mean a different mix of EU-US-Japanese-Australian etc influence. Not a full change in direction.
Of course, even in a democracy, it is always a problem maintaining freedoms. I think the decline in number of people who likes objectivity and the scientific method and reason as a thing to strive for in life (and politics) worrisome in that regard, and a failure in western education. And it has strong effects on how our governments act and communicate, too. But that's not China's fault at all.
Not that China doesn't have highly questionable politics and distribution of wealth. But you also ought to see that the growth China has right now is the only chance for 1.3 billion Chinese to no longer live in abject poverty. It is not really something to dislike per se.
I don't think there's a terrible problem with Wolfram Alpha in this regard. It's pretty good at guessing what you meant.
And more importantly, even if it gets your query wrong, you can write the precise one based on the (usually at least partially correct) query it generated from natural language. This is very often more efficient than doing help/google queries for appropriate commands and their syntax...
Slashdot Mirror
Can your grandmother usually transform data using a computer?
No? Then she can or has to use software written by someone else. Basically how she always works with data on her computer.
I guess in some roundabout way it makes sense for things like CDs and MP3 player devices. But this is supposed to be a tax on memory cards! There's a very small fraction of these being used in mobile phones, and whatever is being used for music often got paid for, again, through iTunes and co..
The real large bulk of usage is other data on mobile phones, as well as use in cameras. Is the entire software industry being recompensated, too? And how is that large fraction of the price of especially the smaller memory cards appropriate when most usage is NOT for music?
This is almost obligatory. Part 30 shows some interesting things, though there are also quite a few of the other parts that are relevant. Get to know the Discovery Institute by video... if you want, feel free to also read about it on Wikipedia
Now, here's the more specifically likely source of this "null hypothesis" stuff, the flawed arguments by Dembski, another one of the former members of Discovery Institute.
The united nations is about avoiding disputes over commercial ventures. The UN should actually be the ones that "own" the solar system, because determining who does in the classic military fashion mankind settled such possible disputes in the past would be a very, very bad idea.
And the only large-ish space station that I know of that even fell even just partially uncontrolled actually hit the ground far from where it was supposed to go (Skylab). The bigger MIR was very carefully de-orbited - still debris hit the ground. You don't want to know what would have happened if someone actually tried to maximize rather than minimize the damage... or what would happen if the same was done with something of the size of ISS.
And really, some of these nations destroying some satellites (which in some cases doesn't even mean "completely shattered") does not at all mean they can deal with a space station or an asteroid with a slightly altered trajectory. Nor will things be fine until all nations can be protected.
I'd like UN regulation and control of all exploitation of space. If there can't be broad consensus over it should be used commercially, space should just remain unused. We can't afford quarrels over space.
Besides, until the nations of the world can defend themselves against, say, asteroids that may have their trajectories altered or falling space stations, it is also not at all clever to allow any particularly large or particularly maneuverable commercial venues out there.
Even with FOSS software you depend on others to maintain it. If they stop, then you don't get updates.
Wrong. You just don't get free updates anymore if others cease to maintain a piece of software, now you have to create additions or maintenance fixes by yourself.
Or, as is more realistic for most people and organizations, hire someone with skills matching the problem to do it. It is not like programmers -even fairly well-trained ones- are much more of a rarity or generally more expensive than doctors of matching skill. Plus, maybe your problem is one that doesn't even require skills like any kind of doctor. Add to that that some may be convinced to give you a discount, because open source work can be counted as "charitable", too.
If you don't get paid well enough for your contributions to the economy, that's a different story and should be addressed. But not by cheap fuel with all the side-effects, but just plain higher, more fair wages. Indirect solutions only get you screwed over.
This here is really just about petrol cars and their emissions. Emissions which have effects that provably accumulate a lot of varied damage all over society. The health costs alone are quite insane, but not the only cost.
It is damage which so far people would ignore, because doing anything individually does mainly just dents their own budget with no visible personal gain. Well, now you eventually might have to, and it makes sense for (almost) everyone if everyone drastically reduces or stops their emissions.
So, according to you, the plan is:
1. Obama does not withdraw from Iraq as fast as he promised to during his election campaign.
2. ???
3. The US attack Libya with the intent to get its oil - and not like before in trade, but occupation of sorts. Also implied: Libya exports to the US, not to the EU, China, and Turkey anymore as it did before.
4. Profit!
Correct?
The difference actually is that Obama isn't after the oil in Libya...
If it turns into a "Serbian-style" conflict, then we'll be helping the wrong side yet again.
Assuming you're a citizen of a NATO member country, you were on the correct side. Both in the humanitarian sense (fighting the worst war criminals, even if combatants had a pretty shoddy record) and in the general sense (supporting a democracy or an authoritarian state - guess which is better)...
I also feel very strongly against this action. UN-sanctioned or no, it's a declaration of war
I disagree, the UN matters. It decides what is the law of nations, and whether and how to enforce it. We all know it is still law made by men, but in this case, it represents the overwhelming majority of humanity and a good part of its power, too. It should not be ignored, for both practical and moral reasons.
war of which we have plenty right now.
Hey, if you wanted to stay clear of this one, you could actually do so, the rest will likely somehow get the job done. But would you really want to start two wars that aren't exactly perceived as righteous, and then turn down one that mostly is?
This is a civil war. Ghaddafi keeps his revolutionary guard well-paid, and his military is more than he needs to maintain control. The UN forces will only prolong the fighting, and it's very difficult to convince the world that the no-fly action has nothing to do with the price of oil.
I don't think either applies.
A few things about the actual fighting: There's no real way to take heavy equipment or even just cars or carts with supplies through the desert when superior planes and helicopters control the air. And the important cities are the ones at the coast. Guess who'll have superiority in either place, even if it were just France vs Libya?
About the Libyan oil: Really, there are probably economic motivations at work, but this idea seems far-fetched. The EU and US at least surely care more about not getting a rebel army worth of refugees, safe shipping channels through the mediterranean sea, and safe coastlines. Definitely not the comparatively small bit of oil that might be expensively exploited (the cost of paying for the security of the extraction effort, the cost of domestic protests against it all, etc.) instead of just bought in trade.
'Everything short of an invasion' is rhetoric. This is a declaration of war. It violates Libya's sovereignty. From here on in, its not a question of who is right and who is wrong. It is a question of who applies more force to subdue whom.[...]
I think you missed the part where member states, like Libya, explicitly agreed to various things the UN charter demands from members.
The UN is also not just some random faction subject to international law. No, it is essentially the international law, even though if its enforcement is only taken care of by willing volunteers.
With the intervention of western countries, do you think this resolution will influence further revolutions across the globe, fueled by the hope that the UN will come to the rescue if the targets of revolt become aggressors similar to Gadhafi?
I wouldn't advise anyone starting a revolution unless they realistically can win. As far as Libya is concerned, the world's most powerful factions are now quite convinced that Gadaffi and/or his forces are too insane, too brutal, too much going against their ideals and interests, and too close nearby, and the rest does not even disagree. Protecting people as described in the resolution is hence already very close to meaning the destruction Gadaffi's armies, so it may actually benefit the rebels decisively.
But I don't think most other rebels can even be "too close nearby" or get many of these other things, at which point it may even be doubtful if anyone cares for them.
Isn't it interesting that social media and modern technology have done more for the desire for democratization than most of our cold-war efforts ever did?
Social media are helpful. But it took enormous steps for all of China, Russia, and the EU, even (in recent times especially) the US to get to where they are now. All social media wouldn't matter much otherwise, we would either already be at each other's throat, close to or entirely extinct, or actively preventing anyone from gaining prestige, territory, influence and anything. In the last case, what the rebels wanted wouldn't matter, they'd be just one more battlefield to fight on over entirely different issues, or be ignored.
Java applets!
[...]The point is that Stallman probably doesn't insist on full schematics for his microwave. He probably doesn't ask for the complete recipe for the TV dinner he's nuking. He probably doesn't tour the facility where the TV dinner (and/or microwave) was built. He probably doesn't check to make sure that the cows that were used to make the leather for his sneakers were free-range and humanely slaughtered.[...]
You actually can modify (fix or alter) your sneakers or microwave with not much more effort than the original producer. Looking at the components from the outside as they are will generally tell you exactly what they do, too. And here, unlike with software, an occasional surprise inspection and scrutiny of the equipment available and used in the industrial facilities and tests of samples is quite good to ensure animals get butchered humanely or that food is created according to a certain recipe.
But with software, you generally need all of the code, build instructions and documentation as well as access to the binary in order to meaningfully be able to either inspect or modify it. And evil can be done in the slightest fraction of it, generally without any good means of detection and with maybe only one programmer knowing that it was done.
What "smaller countries" vote on everything? Or in other words, what countries other than just Switzerland practice direct democracy regularly and systematically at the national level? I think there are none. The USA with its state-level ballot measures / ballot questions is probably the closest thing so far - at least until the EU possibly gets an practicable implementation of initiatives and referendums.
Anyways now to correct the other bit: The notion of direct democracy in Switzerland means that people can collect a percentage of the population's signatures -it is specified in absolute numbers, but saying it like this makes the point more obvious- to "forcibly" initiate a public vote on new laws, or (more easily) stop new laws passed by the government.
As you might guess, the "collect signatures" part very much limits the number of issues that actually will be voted on, and they only get voted on on the national level if it in fact is a nation-wide law that needs to be passed or undone- so no hindrance in practicing the same in the USA, really. They often are simply taken on consequential issues parliament has either not wanted to decide yet, or that parliament has decided wrongly or insufficiently. An example of what one issue that probably would not have dragged on for so long with the right to initiate a vote in the USA: Recompensating any 9/11 first responders for illnesses they may have contracted.
Apart from all that, specific kinds of laws, like changes in the constitution or specific areas of the law may also just simply require a public vote. Even parliament itself can initiate a public vote so they don't have to decide an issue... but you already know that from your own legal practice, except it never happens on the national level, as far as I can tell.
You forgot the amount of data that mankind wants to keep grows and no end is in sight, even if you consolidated data in a "cloud" with de-duplication and only a few copies for redundancy it would grow. One example everyone knows is how cameras and their produced files got larger and larger resolutions recently, that trend probably won't stop...
So, the need for data storage will keep growing and that data storage better be reasonably long-lived if you want to stay in business, because that is a primary feature for these devices for just about your entire customer base. Short-lived devices will degrade your reputation as a vendor rapidly and for a long time...
Well yes, they are a bit of a unnecessary luxury by now. We want information to be on the internet or our hard disk drives, in proper form for reading on many screen form factors and many OS's supported readers, printable and storable. If libraries could offer that, they could stay as very relevant as Wikipedia is.
Of course, the modern information access that is being demanded directly contradicts the business model of most copyright holders. Now the question is, which of these two is unsustainable... and I'll say it's the old copyright model, both because of the very excessive duration of protection (which by now ensures it never ever will benefit the living people who protect the copyright in the first place), as well as the very fact that it does not practically work in our society without various very ugly forms of restrictions in our own homes and on the internet to support it.
It is not the internet and free services that need fixing, but the laws regarding intellectual property.
You're being extremely generous. With the time it takes to publish something these days, 10 years total including renewal is more than enough motivation.
In fact, that may still be too generous. Even people who do their marketing themselves, inefficiently, for a rather niche audience, ought to recoup their money by that time if they wrote anything worth reading at all.
Yes! Yes, I can! Computer science and/or IT subjects are at least as badly off as maths. These, too, are usually taught as "training" not "education" by the definition of the original article. But usually they stop teaching you at the equivalent to addition in maths - most just teach people how to click buttons in MS Office.
An educated programmer (or other engineer) knows a lot both about technical feasibility and about customer wishes. An educated programmer will also often contradict the illusions of feasibility and usefulness that computer-uneducated marketing and management have. As information scientists & analysts, they even may have better education in parts of a management job than the mangers themselves.
So, that should by all means result in much more influence on the company than a graphical artist. Essentially, they often should be sitting on the same table and always on eye-level with even top-level management, because they are the only ones that really have a means to estimate feasibility and time/resource consumption on what's usually by far the most complex part of work in a product (and hence the largest risk), PLUS knowledge about customer wishes that management and marketing often does not have, PLUS an useful elevated ability to work with information in general which that enables them to -say- work out if a complex project schedule is realistic or not in a systematic fashion, PLUS they are amongst the hardest to replace if they leave a company.
Programmers don't obsolete management skills or marketing skills. But they are not used well at all -and your company will feel that just as badly as having a bad CEO- if they are only seen as the people who execute tasks as much as possible to the specifications by management or marketing, like graphic artists.
So what if you need a good idea, too? You still cannot get away with a good idea that is poorly implemented by engineers and scientists - it will also go exactly nowhere if there's any competition at all. Which there will be, unless you live in the US and can just patent the entire industry sector, that is. But we already knew that in the US, lawyers win.
Everywhere else where you don't work with a given monopoly, the mere fact of realizing non-trivial software is well over the head of badly trained programmers, and you will either never complete the software/product, or have a cripped product with drastically reduced specifications that comes at fourteen times over budget and ten times too late, is buggy, and will require massive efforts to adapt once you need it to work on a different computer / with some added functionality. Your potential customers will run for the competition or omit the use of any thing like this entirely, and that's the end of the story.
And ultimately, between having a good idea that is (in some way) feasible, and implementing it sufficiently well, the problem lies far more with the latter. That's the reason why -for instance- we don't have robots do all the manual labour for us yet, even in industry sectors where superficially similar production processes are already done by robots. We all already know that would be really nice and magnitudes of orders more efficient than any manual labour, but getting there is a slow and requires skilled workers that are not plentiful either on the software or on the hardware side of these engineering projects.
They should just make an unified display for the side & rear view, mounted very easily viewable near the forward view - presumably with three cameras, one mounted at the back of the car, two on the side. Merge the picture, put it on a display. A single look would then suffice to get a ~270 degree view - a nice panorama picture.
That would sure help to prevent at least a lot of those non-lethal accidents where people bump into another due to not perfectly checking all views, driving on objects backwards that are low'ish on the ground or missing the timing between checking the rear and side view or whatever...
Nah. You forget that the EU and Japan and Australia and many more are also still in this boat, and they will not at all dismantle democracy because China exists or grows. And the US not being so influential anymore does not have to be a bad thing - it will just mean a different mix of EU-US-Japanese-Australian etc influence. Not a full change in direction.
Of course, even in a democracy, it is always a problem maintaining freedoms. I think the decline in number of people who likes objectivity and the scientific method and reason as a thing to strive for in life (and politics) worrisome in that regard, and a failure in western education. And it has strong effects on how our governments act and communicate, too. But that's not China's fault at all.
Not that China doesn't have highly questionable politics and distribution of wealth. But you also ought to see that the growth China has right now is the only chance for 1.3 billion Chinese to no longer live in abject poverty. It is not really something to dislike per se.
I don't think there's a terrible problem with Wolfram Alpha in this regard. It's pretty good at guessing what you meant.
And more importantly, even if it gets your query wrong, you can write the precise one based on the (usually at least partially correct) query it generated from natural language. This is very often more efficient than doing help/google queries for appropriate commands and their syntax...