I underwent firearms training in a US state that also permitted, according to statue law, deadly force to prevent a variety of felonies in addition to severe bodily harm to us or someone else. We were advised in class that any such use of deadly force by us, mere citizens, would most likely result in a homicide conviction.
That seems unlikely. All you'd have to do is to demonstrate in court that a reasonable person in your shoes may have believed the action necessary to prevent the forcible felony. Note that I don't doubt that your instructor told you it would most likely result in a homicide conviction; I'm sure he did. But there are a lot of concealed carry instructors who say a lot of incorrect things. Try to find an actual case where someone was convicted for using deadly force to prevent a forcible felony. I'll bet you can't. There are a lot of these urban legends floating around the gun community.
FWIW, I'm a concealed carry instructor... but one with an academic bent, meaning I prefer to do the research to verify a claim, rather than just repeat the scary stories that float around. I actually began teaching precisely because I discovered that *my* instructor had spouted so many falsehoods (he was a former cop, and they are the worst instructors, by and large).
OTOH, I do teach my students that it's wise to assume that if they ever shoot anyone they'll go to prison for it, because it biases the decision in the right direction. If you assume that shooting will send you to prison, then you'll only shoot if whatever would happen if you don't shoot is worse than prison. If that's your standard, you're very unlikely to actually go to prison because you won't shoot in marginal circumstances -- and if you do end up going to prison, well, you'd already decided that was the best outcome.
In exchange for manual memory allocation, C++ gives you automatic memory allocation: lots of it.
Nonsense. You don't get memory allocation unless you ask for it.
When resources are scarce (eg. IOT devices) this overhead can be a show stopper.
You're misinformed. With C++11 move semantics, you can have both safe, automatic ownership management, and no unnecessary dynamic allocation. Most of my work is done in a very constrained environment, where I have only a handful of pages of heap... or in some cases none at all. C++ is awesome for such environments.
Something that C++ advocates seem to ignore there is no free lunch.
No one is claiming that there is. What there is, is the opportunity to delegate tedious and error-prone due diligence that C programmers have to do themselves to the compiler. For example, you know all those functions that have comments describing whether the returned data structure's contents are owned by the caller or the library? In C++ you can write the function so that it's impossible for the caller to avoid taking ownership when that's what you want, or so that it's impossible for the caller to believe it has ownership when the library is retaining it. If the caller gets it wrong, the compiler will flag the error. That's one example, there are many, many more. C++ enables you to have buffers and strings that do automatic bounds checking... or even to write code such that potential bounds violations are flagged by the compiler, making run-times bounds checks provably unnecessary.
There's no magic here, just language constructs that allow you to accurately specify the semantics you want, which the compiler can enforce.
That's exactly the sort of phrase a business would use to justify their wildly noncompetitive and unethical behavior. It's practically a textbook example.
Doesn't change the fact that it's only your assumption that it should be read that way. There's no evidence. Also, this (allegedly) isn't a business.
Unless you think that only corporations want "free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty". Corporations typically want none of those things.
It's the corporate doubletalk that's confusing the issue.
You're assuming it's doublespeak, and so did jandrese, and I strongly suspect that you're both right, but it is an assumption. There's nothing in the text to make it clear.
Update: I found the closest thing to a mission statement I could find buried in a wall of text on page 17 of their 2013 tax return.
Although the Phoenix Center does not meet the safe harbor test for public support (33-1/3%) in 2013, it believes that the following facts and circumstances support the organization's continuance as a public charity. The Phoenix Center has grown and developed since its inception to become a voice for consumer welfare by promoting free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty.
In other words, its exacta what everyone thinks. This is yet another one of those corporate mouthpiece "think tanks" that release studies to push a corporate agenda.
I think you're right about that, but that's not what the text says. Unless you think that only corporations want "free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty". Corporations typically want none of those things. They like markets that benefit them at the expense of their competitors, not free markets, and they'd love to have no competition. They tend not to care much about individual freedom and liberty, except to the degree that their directors feel personally strong about such issues.
If YouTube were to pay the recorded music industry market rates, similar to what other streaming services pay, its economic contributions to the sector would be 0. This would be so because YouTube would simply not allow copyright music on its service.
But YouTube actually does pay the industry. Most of the time, if you post a copyrighted song the copyright owner doesn't bother filing a DMCA takedown request, YouTube just informs you that your video contains copyrighted material and that instead of paying you for any ad revenue from views, YouTube pays the copyright holder. I've made a few videos for weddings and funerals, set to music, and that's the case for all of my videos. I don't care. I didn't make them to make money but to honor the people in them, and being able to use the subjects' favorite music and allow the copyright holder to get paid for that use is perfectly acceptable to me.
Are the rates YouTube pays "market rates"? Beats me. They're the rates that the copyright holders agreed to, which makes them "market rates" by definition, doesn't it?
It's not clear to me what the author of this paper is talking about, exactly. Is he talking about revenue lost to copyright holders tho haven't bothered to register their material with YouTube so it can be automatically identified and paid for? Is he talking about revenue lost to copyright holders because YouTube's systems fail to identify their material? The most likely thing, based on the summary, (no, I did not RTFA), is that he believes that if YouTube had to pre-vet content to avoid being sued for inadvertently hosting infringing material, then YouTube would simply not exist and that record labels would instead be able to run their own services and charge whatever they wanted.
I agree that if you allow the record labels complete control, they can find more ways to extract revenue. I don't agree that that's a good thing.
Cool! Thanks. That speaks to several things I've been turning over in my mind.
YW. Note that I think the industry has changed a little, and I'm not sure that being a generalist is practical any more. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't know about a lot of different things, but there's value in being expert in one field. Note I said one field, not one technology and especially not one tool. Being expert in one tool is great in the short term while that tool is in demand, but it's also a good way to get left behind. Oh, and you have to expect that you'll constantly be learning new stuff for your entire career.
My bottom line, though, is that if you're smart and have an actual interest in software technology for itself, rather than just as a profession, you can develop software for as long as you want to. At some point you'll run into a compensation ceiling, and breaking that requires moving into a different sort of role. But... the ceiling is pretty high if you find a company that values you. And you can make it even higher if you go independent, though that comes with considerable risk.
Government is way too incompetent to pull any of these crazy scenarios off....
Especially while keeping it quiet.
Look at the big government scandals of the last few decades, how many people were involved and how they were outed. Then line them up against common conspiracy theories and look at how many people would have to have been involved in them and how perfectly they would have to be executed and how many people would have to be kept quiet. Any rational analysis will quickly conclude that a government that couldn't keep a blow job in the oval office secret, or a hotel room wiretap, or low-key, small-scale sale of arms to Iraq, or prisoner abuse in a prison on the other side of the world, could never manage what the conspiracy theorists claim.
And, actually, this isn't even evidence of incompetence. Keeping secrets is really hard, and it's darned near impossible when the secrets carry moral baggage that encourages disclosure. Someone eventually outs it. Attempts to bully or eliminate possible leakers to keep them quiet just generates even more secrets with even more moral baggage. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il can probably suppress information he wants suppressed. Most of the time. In the US? No way.
The nuclear field's safety record is stellar, at least in the USA, so honestly that's a non-issue, but clean and safe nuclear power has never been cost effective. The controls required to meet current American safety standards are prohibitively expensive
And it was stellar before the regulations were ratcheted up, causing the cost to quadruple.
The reason that nuclear is prohibitively expensive is that we've pushed the safety standards far, far beyond what any rational analysis would require. We could reduce them dramatically and still have the safest power generation technology mankind has ever produced.
In a nutshell, I gave up on nuclear power after investing a decade of my life in it because it's a solution in search of a problem.
Nonsense. There's a very clear problem: clean, safe, cheap, large-scale power generation. Regulations have killed the "cheap" part, in order to add a few more nines to an already-outstanding safety record. Worse, they've so badly damaged the industry that newer designs that are inherently cheaper and safer can't even get off the ground because everyone is afraid to invest in them because of what the NRC might think of to hamstring those as well.
Luckily, it looks like renewables are progressing and might someday be able to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. It'll take a lot longer and be a lot more expensive than nuclear, though. Our insane nuclear power regulations are going to make global warming significantly worse and the economic impact of managing it much greater.
But they're still there. What you've described constitutes deep and systematic racism and sexism that place serious obstacles in front of anyone who isn't the right race and gender. Just because no one is doing it "on purpose", that everyone has good intentions and thinks they're doing their best to be fair doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's the result of pervasive unconscious biases.
Prove it. Prove that's what's happening. You are making an extraordinary claim, you must justify it.
You described it! If you still can't see it, I can't help you.
Because who gets promoted to management is entirely based on merit, right?
Sadly no. In my experience, who gets promoted to management has more to do with who you're friends with than actual ability.
Please note that gender and race were not mentioned *once* in the above.
But they're still there. What you've described constitutes deep and systematic racism and sexism that place serious obstacles in front of anyone who isn't the right race and gender. Just because no one is doing it "on purpose", that everyone has good intentions and thinks they're doing their best to be fair doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's the result of pervasive unconscious biases.
So, how do you overcome those unconscious biases, break the stranglehold of the good old boys' network on management positions (or a thousand other similar structures)? How do you root out the unconscious biases and make the people who hold them see that they do? Remember, these are well-intentioned people who consider themselves to be kind, and fair... but they just tend to hang out with their own kind, so that's who they know, and who gets promoted.
Serious question. What's your answer? Just letting the self-reinforcing system continue isn't a good one. So what do you do?
I've done a lot of things. I've somewhat specialized in security of the cryptographic sort, but I've done embedded work, web sites (LAMP, J2EE, other stuff), networking (network drivers, worked on a reverse proxy, even wrote a TCP stack back in the day), point of sale systems, and a lot more. These days I work on Android, but that may change in the next year or two.
On the other hand, even without a government seal of approval, there are highly-skilled programmers in the world who have written lots of important and well-respected code that runs critical systems and does it very well. These are clearly worth of the name software engineer. The same applies to certain people who do software architecture, and deserve the label software architect.
So it's not that software engineering doesn't exist, or isn't a valid title, the only issue is that there's no defined standard by which to judge whether an individual merits the label.
and "anybody can understand this by just looking at it, it doesn't need to be explained."
I beg to differ with this one. Code can be so clear and readable that no further documentation is required. It's just that writing such code is hard work, and never happens by accident.
After your code is complete, all tests pass, etc., take another pass and look for anything that isn't clear. Whenever you find a section that seems to benefit from an explanatory comment, try to rewrite it so that the comment is no longer needed. In many cases, this is as simple as moving the bit of code to a well-named function -- essentially you're replacing the comment with the function name. In other cases, renaming variables, or introducing new variables explicitly so that you can provide them with good names does the job. In other cases reordering/restructuring the code so that it has a more linear progression, and addresses subproblems in a logical and consistent way is needed. And sometimes, at the end of all that, there's some part that just requires a comment. In that case, add it, but only after exhausting all other options.
Then, let the code alone and do the same thing again tomorrow when your eyes are fresh. Then get a peer to review it (you're doing code reviews anyway, right?), and get their suggestions as to what isn't clear and obvious. Along the way, keep an eye out for bits of code that are clarified only by function and variable names, and look for ways to ensure that the function can't easily be changed in ways that invalidate the chosen names. Rinse, repeat until you reach the point that no more improvements can be found.
If this sounds like a lot more work than just writing an explanatory comment, you're damned right it is. But it's also much better, because, other than docsctrings, which are great, comments are evil. Over time, code evolves and comments tend not to get updated. I'd much rather maintain hard-to-read code with no comments than hard-to-read code with comments that are wrong. And in easy-to-read code, comments are pointless at best and a waste of time at worst, because experienced developers know that you can't just trust that the comment is correct, you also have to read the code.
Oh so your ultimate answer is taxation on the AI/robotic overlords in order to feed the masses?
Again, your ignorance blinds you.
Dude, tone down the rhetoric. It really doesn't facilitate rational discussion. Unless your goal isn't to have a rational discussion but just to make yourself feel good by spewing doom. In that case, I guess you're succeeding, but I have no motivation to participate further.
You assume that taxation has been the ultimate answer today, as trillions sit in offshore tax havens, driven by billionaire-funded lobbyists who manipulate governments into funding this kind of Greed. I fail to see how this shit situation will ever change in the future. The end result will be UBI being funded at the lowest legal level, which will essentially mean Welfare 2.0 for the planet.
The problem with money sitting offshore is caused entirely by the foolish decision to tax corporate income. Drop the corporate taxes -- or even reduce the rate significantly -- and that money will come flooding back, because it's not actually doing its owners any good offshore. Instead tax the shareholders on their gains. They can't so easily hide offshore because they actually want to live here.
paid for by taxing the owners of the capital infrastructure (i.e. the robots) that do all of the production
You're making a crazy assumption that the owners of the infrastructure will agree to voluntarily pay taxes in order to support useless masses.
As long as the masses have the vote, and therefore the ability to command police and military forces, there's no "voluntary" about it. That said, as long as there's still room for making more money, even with the taxes, they'll do it.
Fine, a massive capital gains tax on dividends, on resource extraction licenses, and a massive tax on any income over $500,000, including any "interest-free loans", shares, and any other financial instrument.
Rather than a flat "over $500K", the scale should be graduated, up to very high rates at the top end. Also, it's worth noting that interest-free loans, etc., are already treated as income by the IRS.
If you think taxing corporations is bad, then tax the living fuck out of those that are making the money.
You make it sound punitive. No need for that. In fact, you want to be careful not to remove the incentive for generating even high
Oh, and repeal all corporate personhood. All shareholders will be liable for the misdeeds of the corporation, up to and including imprisonment for death and injury a corporation causes, and seizure of shareholders' assets in the case of insolvency or financial penalty beyond current cash and asset reserves.
Oh, hell no. I'm a shareholder and so are you if you have any kind of retirement investments. There are very good reasons for limiting shareholder liability. If you want to hold someone criminally liable for severe misdeeds, the target you want is the executives who ordered the misdeeds, not the shareholders.
But keep in mind that not all civilizations are technological. Humanity existed for 250K years without computers.
Not in any lifestyle that I would want to live. Nor that I'd call "civilization", at least not for any but the top 0.01%. The GP mentioned millenia of dark ages... but the dark ages were actually significantly better for the average human than earlier ages -- including the peaks of the earlier great civilizations, all of which were built on the backs of vast numbers of slave laborers. Serfdom sucked, but it was better than slavery. Serfs had more rights, were better fed, etc.
I don't disagree with your basic argument, just the part that pre-technological civilization wasn't so bad. It was bad. But there's absolutely no reason to think we're going back to it. The robots are going to dramatically improve productivity yet again and, combined with ongoing technological advancement, usher in an age of abundance in which there aren't enough jobs because there's simply no need for everyone to work. I'm confident humanity will be able to find other ways to keep itself occupied.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed WiMax is fairly widely deployed. It's what delivers Internet to my house.
I underwent firearms training in a US state that also permitted, according to statue law, deadly force to prevent a variety of felonies in addition to severe bodily harm to us or someone else. We were advised in class that any such use of deadly force by us, mere citizens, would most likely result in a homicide conviction.
That seems unlikely. All you'd have to do is to demonstrate in court that a reasonable person in your shoes may have believed the action necessary to prevent the forcible felony. Note that I don't doubt that your instructor told you it would most likely result in a homicide conviction; I'm sure he did. But there are a lot of concealed carry instructors who say a lot of incorrect things. Try to find an actual case where someone was convicted for using deadly force to prevent a forcible felony. I'll bet you can't. There are a lot of these urban legends floating around the gun community.
FWIW, I'm a concealed carry instructor... but one with an academic bent, meaning I prefer to do the research to verify a claim, rather than just repeat the scary stories that float around. I actually began teaching precisely because I discovered that *my* instructor had spouted so many falsehoods (he was a former cop, and they are the worst instructors, by and large).
OTOH, I do teach my students that it's wise to assume that if they ever shoot anyone they'll go to prison for it, because it biases the decision in the right direction. If you assume that shooting will send you to prison, then you'll only shoot if whatever would happen if you don't shoot is worse than prison. If that's your standard, you're very unlikely to actually go to prison because you won't shoot in marginal circumstances -- and if you do end up going to prison, well, you'd already decided that was the best outcome.
In exchange for manual memory allocation, C++ gives you automatic memory allocation: lots of it.
Nonsense. You don't get memory allocation unless you ask for it.
When resources are scarce (eg. IOT devices) this overhead can be a show stopper.
You're misinformed. With C++11 move semantics, you can have both safe, automatic ownership management, and no unnecessary dynamic allocation. Most of my work is done in a very constrained environment, where I have only a handful of pages of heap... or in some cases none at all. C++ is awesome for such environments.
Something that C++ advocates seem to ignore there is no free lunch.
No one is claiming that there is. What there is, is the opportunity to delegate tedious and error-prone due diligence that C programmers have to do themselves to the compiler. For example, you know all those functions that have comments describing whether the returned data structure's contents are owned by the caller or the library? In C++ you can write the function so that it's impossible for the caller to avoid taking ownership when that's what you want, or so that it's impossible for the caller to believe it has ownership when the library is retaining it. If the caller gets it wrong, the compiler will flag the error. That's one example, there are many, many more. C++ enables you to have buffers and strings that do automatic bounds checking... or even to write code such that potential bounds violations are flagged by the compiler, making run-times bounds checks provably unnecessary.
There's no magic here, just language constructs that allow you to accurately specify the semantics you want, which the compiler can enforce.
That's exactly the sort of phrase a business would use to justify their wildly noncompetitive and unethical behavior. It's practically a textbook example.
Doesn't change the fact that it's only your assumption that it should be read that way. There's no evidence. Also, this (allegedly) isn't a business.
Unless you think that only corporations want "free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty". Corporations typically want none of those things.
It's the corporate doubletalk that's confusing the issue.
You're assuming it's doublespeak, and so did jandrese, and I strongly suspect that you're both right, but it is an assumption. There's nothing in the text to make it clear.
Update: I found the closest thing to a mission statement I could find buried in a wall of text on page 17 of their 2013 tax return.
In other words, its exacta what everyone thinks. This is yet another one of those corporate mouthpiece "think tanks" that release studies to push a corporate agenda.
I think you're right about that, but that's not what the text says. Unless you think that only corporations want "free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty". Corporations typically want none of those things. They like markets that benefit them at the expense of their competitors, not free markets, and they'd love to have no competition. They tend not to care much about individual freedom and liberty, except to the degree that their directors feel personally strong about such issues.
If YouTube were to pay the recorded music industry market rates, similar to what other streaming services pay, its economic contributions to the sector would be 0. This would be so because YouTube would simply not allow copyright music on its service.
But YouTube actually does pay the industry. Most of the time, if you post a copyrighted song the copyright owner doesn't bother filing a DMCA takedown request, YouTube just informs you that your video contains copyrighted material and that instead of paying you for any ad revenue from views, YouTube pays the copyright holder. I've made a few videos for weddings and funerals, set to music, and that's the case for all of my videos. I don't care. I didn't make them to make money but to honor the people in them, and being able to use the subjects' favorite music and allow the copyright holder to get paid for that use is perfectly acceptable to me.
Are the rates YouTube pays "market rates"? Beats me. They're the rates that the copyright holders agreed to, which makes them "market rates" by definition, doesn't it?
It's not clear to me what the author of this paper is talking about, exactly. Is he talking about revenue lost to copyright holders tho haven't bothered to register their material with YouTube so it can be automatically identified and paid for? Is he talking about revenue lost to copyright holders because YouTube's systems fail to identify their material? The most likely thing, based on the summary, (no, I did not RTFA), is that he believes that if YouTube had to pre-vet content to avoid being sued for inadvertently hosting infringing material, then YouTube would simply not exist and that record labels would instead be able to run their own services and charge whatever they wanted.
I agree that if you allow the record labels complete control, they can find more ways to extract revenue. I don't agree that that's a good thing.
Cool! Thanks. That speaks to several things I've been turning over in my mind.
YW. Note that I think the industry has changed a little, and I'm not sure that being a generalist is practical any more. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't know about a lot of different things, but there's value in being expert in one field. Note I said one field, not one technology and especially not one tool. Being expert in one tool is great in the short term while that tool is in demand, but it's also a good way to get left behind. Oh, and you have to expect that you'll constantly be learning new stuff for your entire career.
My bottom line, though, is that if you're smart and have an actual interest in software technology for itself, rather than just as a profession, you can develop software for as long as you want to. At some point you'll run into a compensation ceiling, and breaking that requires moving into a different sort of role. But... the ceiling is pretty high if you find a company that values you. And you can make it even higher if you go independent, though that comes with considerable risk.
Government is way too incompetent to pull any of these crazy scenarios off....
Especially while keeping it quiet.
Look at the big government scandals of the last few decades, how many people were involved and how they were outed. Then line them up against common conspiracy theories and look at how many people would have to have been involved in them and how perfectly they would have to be executed and how many people would have to be kept quiet. Any rational analysis will quickly conclude that a government that couldn't keep a blow job in the oval office secret, or a hotel room wiretap, or low-key, small-scale sale of arms to Iraq, or prisoner abuse in a prison on the other side of the world, could never manage what the conspiracy theorists claim.
And, actually, this isn't even evidence of incompetence. Keeping secrets is really hard, and it's darned near impossible when the secrets carry moral baggage that encourages disclosure. Someone eventually outs it. Attempts to bully or eliminate possible leakers to keep them quiet just generates even more secrets with even more moral baggage. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il can probably suppress information he wants suppressed. Most of the time. In the US? No way.
The nuclear field's safety record is stellar, at least in the USA, so honestly that's a non-issue, but clean and safe nuclear power has never been cost effective. The controls required to meet current American safety standards are prohibitively expensive
And it was stellar before the regulations were ratcheted up, causing the cost to quadruple.
The reason that nuclear is prohibitively expensive is that we've pushed the safety standards far, far beyond what any rational analysis would require. We could reduce them dramatically and still have the safest power generation technology mankind has ever produced.
In a nutshell, I gave up on nuclear power after investing a decade of my life in it because it's a solution in search of a problem.
Nonsense. There's a very clear problem: clean, safe, cheap, large-scale power generation. Regulations have killed the "cheap" part, in order to add a few more nines to an already-outstanding safety record. Worse, they've so badly damaged the industry that newer designs that are inherently cheaper and safer can't even get off the ground because everyone is afraid to invest in them because of what the NRC might think of to hamstring those as well.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
Luckily, it looks like renewables are progressing and might someday be able to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. It'll take a lot longer and be a lot more expensive than nuclear, though. Our insane nuclear power regulations are going to make global warming significantly worse and the economic impact of managing it much greater.
You start your own company. Nothin' stopping you.
Just sayin'.
So, your answer is to ignore it. I see.
But they're still there. What you've described constitutes deep and systematic racism and sexism that place serious obstacles in front of anyone who isn't the right race and gender. Just because no one is doing it "on purpose", that everyone has good intentions and thinks they're doing their best to be fair doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's the result of pervasive unconscious biases.
Prove it. Prove that's what's happening. You are making an extraordinary claim, you must justify it.
You described it! If you still can't see it, I can't help you.
Because who gets promoted to management is entirely based on merit, right?
Sadly no. In my experience, who gets promoted to management has more to do with who you're friends with than actual ability.
Please note that gender and race were not mentioned *once* in the above.
But they're still there. What you've described constitutes deep and systematic racism and sexism that place serious obstacles in front of anyone who isn't the right race and gender. Just because no one is doing it "on purpose", that everyone has good intentions and thinks they're doing their best to be fair doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's the result of pervasive unconscious biases.
So, how do you overcome those unconscious biases, break the stranglehold of the good old boys' network on management positions (or a thousand other similar structures)? How do you root out the unconscious biases and make the people who hold them see that they do? Remember, these are well-intentioned people who consider themselves to be kind, and fair... but they just tend to hang out with their own kind, so that's who they know, and who gets promoted.
Serious question. What's your answer? Just letting the self-reinforcing system continue isn't a good one. So what do you do?
Absolutely agreed. There are exceptions to every rule -- which doesn't make the rules any less valuable.
Which reminds me "Everyone will assume I'm right if I sound authorative, and say 'you're damned right it is' a lot" :-)
Well, I am right, so that works :-)
Maybe I should have said "you're damned right it is" more than once, to increase the authoritativeness quotient.
Concisely put.
What stack ?
I've done a lot of things. I've somewhat specialized in security of the cryptographic sort, but I've done embedded work, web sites (LAMP, J2EE, other stuff), networking (network drivers, worked on a reverse proxy, even wrote a TCP stack back in the day), point of sale systems, and a lot more. These days I work on Android, but that may change in the next year or two.
On the other hand, even without a government seal of approval, there are highly-skilled programmers in the world who have written lots of important and well-respected code that runs critical systems and does it very well. These are clearly worth of the name software engineer. The same applies to certain people who do software architecture, and deserve the label software architect.
So it's not that software engineering doesn't exist, or isn't a valid title, the only issue is that there's no defined standard by which to judge whether an individual merits the label.
"Java is fast"
What is generally not a lie, though, is "Java is fast enough".
and "anybody can understand this by just looking at it, it doesn't need to be explained."
I beg to differ with this one. Code can be so clear and readable that no further documentation is required. It's just that writing such code is hard work, and never happens by accident.
After your code is complete, all tests pass, etc., take another pass and look for anything that isn't clear. Whenever you find a section that seems to benefit from an explanatory comment, try to rewrite it so that the comment is no longer needed. In many cases, this is as simple as moving the bit of code to a well-named function -- essentially you're replacing the comment with the function name. In other cases, renaming variables, or introducing new variables explicitly so that you can provide them with good names does the job. In other cases reordering/restructuring the code so that it has a more linear progression, and addresses subproblems in a logical and consistent way is needed. And sometimes, at the end of all that, there's some part that just requires a comment. In that case, add it, but only after exhausting all other options.
Then, let the code alone and do the same thing again tomorrow when your eyes are fresh. Then get a peer to review it (you're doing code reviews anyway, right?), and get their suggestions as to what isn't clear and obvious. Along the way, keep an eye out for bits of code that are clarified only by function and variable names, and look for ways to ensure that the function can't easily be changed in ways that invalidate the chosen names. Rinse, repeat until you reach the point that no more improvements can be found.
If this sounds like a lot more work than just writing an explanatory comment, you're damned right it is. But it's also much better, because, other than docsctrings, which are great, comments are evil. Over time, code evolves and comments tend not to get updated. I'd much rather maintain hard-to-read code with no comments than hard-to-read code with comments that are wrong. And in easy-to-read code, comments are pointless at best and a waste of time at worst, because experienced developers know that you can't just trust that the comment is correct, you also have to read the code.
also described as: "I can keep working as a software developer as long as I want to".
I dunno. I'm almost 50 and work with guys who are in their 60s. That's definitely as long as I want to work.
Oh so your ultimate answer is taxation on the AI/robotic overlords in order to feed the masses?
Again, your ignorance blinds you.
Dude, tone down the rhetoric. It really doesn't facilitate rational discussion. Unless your goal isn't to have a rational discussion but just to make yourself feel good by spewing doom. In that case, I guess you're succeeding, but I have no motivation to participate further.
You assume that taxation has been the ultimate answer today, as trillions sit in offshore tax havens, driven by billionaire-funded lobbyists who manipulate governments into funding this kind of Greed. I fail to see how this shit situation will ever change in the future. The end result will be UBI being funded at the lowest legal level, which will essentially mean Welfare 2.0 for the planet.
The problem with money sitting offshore is caused entirely by the foolish decision to tax corporate income. Drop the corporate taxes -- or even reduce the rate significantly -- and that money will come flooding back, because it's not actually doing its owners any good offshore. Instead tax the shareholders on their gains. They can't so easily hide offshore because they actually want to live here.
paid for by taxing the owners of the capital infrastructure (i.e. the robots) that do all of the production
You're making a crazy assumption that the owners of the infrastructure will agree to voluntarily pay taxes in order to support useless masses.
As long as the masses have the vote, and therefore the ability to command police and military forces, there's no "voluntary" about it. That said, as long as there's still room for making more money, even with the taxes, they'll do it.
Fine, a massive capital gains tax on dividends, on resource extraction licenses, and a massive tax on any income over $500,000, including any "interest-free loans", shares, and any other financial instrument.
Rather than a flat "over $500K", the scale should be graduated, up to very high rates at the top end. Also, it's worth noting that interest-free loans, etc., are already treated as income by the IRS.
If you think taxing corporations is bad, then tax the living fuck out of those that are making the money.
You make it sound punitive. No need for that. In fact, you want to be careful not to remove the incentive for generating even high
Oh, and repeal all corporate personhood. All shareholders will be liable for the misdeeds of the corporation, up to and including imprisonment for death and injury a corporation causes, and seizure of shareholders' assets in the case of insolvency or financial penalty beyond current cash and asset reserves.
Oh, hell no. I'm a shareholder and so are you if you have any kind of retirement investments. There are very good reasons for limiting shareholder liability. If you want to hold someone criminally liable for severe misdeeds, the target you want is the executives who ordered the misdeeds, not the shareholders.
But keep in mind that not all civilizations are technological. Humanity existed for 250K years without computers.
Not in any lifestyle that I would want to live. Nor that I'd call "civilization", at least not for any but the top 0.01%. The GP mentioned millenia of dark ages... but the dark ages were actually significantly better for the average human than earlier ages -- including the peaks of the earlier great civilizations, all of which were built on the backs of vast numbers of slave laborers. Serfdom sucked, but it was better than slavery. Serfs had more rights, were better fed, etc.
I don't disagree with your basic argument, just the part that pre-technological civilization wasn't so bad. It was bad. But there's absolutely no reason to think we're going back to it. The robots are going to dramatically improve productivity yet again and, combined with ongoing technological advancement, usher in an age of abundance in which there aren't enough jobs because there's simply no need for everyone to work. I'm confident humanity will be able to find other ways to keep itself occupied.