Yeah, but what if bugs are the result of living in simulation? What if "base reality" is so much more such that it is possible for mathematics to be both complete and correct and has solutions for the halting problem? That would actually make it possible to eradicate all bugs in a system.
That's way out there. Once you have that, just ask the question you want answered, why bother with a simulation at all?
Also, the incompatibility between Einsteinian, classical and quantum physics is a pretty big "discrepancy" in the universe, and there may be more exotic physics to be found to explain Dark Matter and Energy.
This applies equally to all reality, though, so it's not a bug, it's a feature. Just because your user cannot understand a feature doesn't mean you didn't intend it to work that way. A bug is a thing that the creators of the software don't understand and didn't intend, and invariably you have a ton of bugs which don't happen uniformly, and thus are really challenging to fix. Reality doesn't have those.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
Whose to say there aren't bugs? As a physics major in college I could certainly be convinced many aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics could be considered bugs. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light? Oops. Quantum entanglement and superposition? We'll fix those in version 2.5. Hopefully by version 4 we can finally get the world to run by what you call Newtonian physics with no exceptions.
If a bug happens to everyone, it's damned easy to fix. But the annoying bugs don't. For the annoying bugs, 1% of your users are having the bug, their reports seem legit, but dozens of people have tried to reproduce it and can't. So you have evidence that someone's system is breaking the rules, you just can't see it.
It would be like if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and I can see exactly what you are doing to accomplish it, but I cannot go faster than the speed of light. It would be like if you reported that electroncs were a wave, and I reported that they were a particle, but we can never figure out why. THIS IS NOT HOW REALITY WORKS. Every time, it has turned out that differing experimental results are because the experiments were different, not because reality was different.
Let's say you have a computer program with 10,000 lines of code in it. How many bugs are there? OK, 100,000 lines, are there 10x as many bugs or 12x? 1M lines? Let's say you have a 10M-line computer program, there are going to be tens or hundreds of thousands of bugs in that thing.
How many bugs have we seen in reality? I don't mean "Oh, _that's_ interesting" and later we figure out general relativity - I mean bugs, the shit bluescreens, or if you look in a certain direction, things are different. How many have we found?
AFAICT, we've found _zero_. Every time we find a discrepency in the universe, later we figure out that it wasn't a discrepency, it's how the entire universe works, and our previous understanding was simply wrong. EVERY TIME. So either the bugs self-heal and become consistent universal features, or they weren't bugs in the first place.
If the universe is a self-organizing emergent property on some very fundamental operator, then I don't see how "simulated" differs from "real". We don't write software that way. We don't build hardware that way. I don't mean a little bit, I mean AT ALL, that's entirely alien to everything in software and hardware, to the point where you might as well be talking about something else entirely.
I changed my mind after reading the article, it's not a UI issue, the car gave the user a warning on the screen, and the user had a chance to cancel. Quote:
The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display; however, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle. Three seconds after that, the driver's door was closed, and another three seconds later, Summon activated pursuant to the driver's double-press activation request.
Yeah, this guy screwed it up (although it's kind of surprising how much information Tesla collects).
It still doesn't sit right with me - my skeptical gut tells me it is silly - but where is the flaw in the logic?
Why is there any reason to assign equivalent probabilities to random hypothetical cases? We have a single example of intelligent life, and all our other candidates share almost all the same genetic code, so we have no basis to even make estimates. We do anyhow, but until you have that second example, you can't tell if we're a one-in-10-light-years occurrence, once-in-a-galaxy, once-in-a-cluster, once-in-a-supercluster, or what.
Also, as of yet we have no examples of anyone successfully building a simulation capable of evolving intelligent life. It's possible that gross physical constraints on the scalability of computing will prevent us from ever managing such a simulation.
Certainly if the simulated system is smaller than the simulator and runs more slowly than the simulator's universe, then it becomes more likely that we live in a real universe. Say our universe is ~10^23 miles across, and we can build a simulator a million miles across. Say the simulator needs 1000 of our most basic reality components to simulate one sub-reality component, and the simulation runs at 1/1000 speed.
Similar thinking works WRT timeframe, can the simulator survive for long enough that the simulated universe can evolve? A factor of 1000 slowdown means that the simulator's universe is going to evolve a great deal in the time it takes the simulated universe to have humans on earth. Is it really reasonable to imagine a simulation running for that long? We can't even maintain a consistent computing system for decades.
When a four-year old is hitting his brother over the head with a baseball bat, the solution isn't "Oh, he's a four-year old, that's just how they live life when they're four". You tell him to stop hitting his brother, and if he doesn't stop you progress to more and more serious consequences.
It's not any different than any number of other things someone might want to combine with watching a movie, such as sex, or lighting up a joint, or playing melodica. Figure out if your primary interest is watching a movie or texting, and if it's texting, go do it in the lobby or in the parking lot or some such shit.
When you say "99% of users never use a feature", then removing that feature makes sense. When you say that "99% of users never report the descriptive error code", and use that as justification to remove the error code entirely, then you guarantee that 100% of users cannot report helpful diagnostic information.
It's super annoying to have a problem with a piece of software, carefully record the details so you can debug things and maybe work towards fixing the problem, only to find that the provided error code is cover for a grab bag of completely unrelated issues. Not quite as annoying as having a reproducible failure case which you can't get across to the vendor because they setup a tech support firewall to protect them from bug reports.
I'm entirely serious. I've been blessed to work with some of the best software engineers in industry for a few decades, now, and I have come to the conclusion that security is simply a very hard problem, right there with locking and storing data. Talented engineers routinely write themselves insecure code and defend their code when you point out the problems, right up until you describe how to break it. At the university level, very few students will have the experience necessary to understand security issues except as a theoretical problem which likely happens to other people. Industry would receive far more benefit from things like courses on code testing.
I'm very sorry to tell you so, but Apple needn't to create software that doesn't exist. It needs to modify an existing piece of software, called firmware that set a limit on the number of attempts with a wrong password before deleting data on the phone and it needs to remove the delay they introduced between attempts to avoid an automatic system to try passwords at a rate no human can. So, the piece of software exists and the modification is about two lines of code and maybe something like less than 10 characters to change in the code.
So if the government handed you a piece of paper and said "Read this into the microphone", you'd consider that not to be restricting your freedom of speech because you didn't have to actually create the message yourself?
This Apple software is written a certain way for reasons specific to the desired functionality. Just like you might choose specific words to get across your specific point, and might not agree to choose alternate words which make an entirely different point.
They never seem to do studies about how the kids turn out who's parents were control-freaks and used things like "video games are evil" and "D&D is evil" and "pogs are evil" to force their kids into the line the parents want them to adhere to.
Admittedly, those are just the excuses those parents use, and as a society our approach seems to be "Well, kids are chattel, nothing we can do about it if their parents are horrible."
A good AI (outside of some sort of drama-like context imposing constraints on what works) should be configurable, to have as much or as little subservience as you want. That's what ownership means.Your computer should do whatever you want it to.
Personally, I'd rather my daily interactions were mostly with people who don't get off on having slaves. Indeed, that is none of my business, but my experience is that just because something is none of my business doesn't mean that bigots in turn keep their opinions to themselves. I'm sure it's possible that people who beat their kids or pets can be perfectly fine co-workers and otherwise upstanding citizens, but I think it's more likely that they'll be consistent bullies in many areas of their life.
When I was in school, a typing/keyboarding class was a pre-req for the computer classes. It was not at all necessary, I did not _actually_ learn to touch-type until a decade later, and at that point I did it because I decided it was stupid to be looking at the keyboard when I should be looking at the code. But, you know, thank goodness I got to waste that semester on something which was basically useless and which was trivial to learn once I decided I needed it.
Later, the "computer" classes in school had a strong dollop of learning how to use a word processor of spreadsheet. Which may be valuable vocational skills, but they were like a "Math for Living" class when the people forcing everyone to take them thought they were getting "Algebra II".
Even later, it was how to create a webpage. Because HTML is certainly the future and we'll never have WYSIWYG tools to do the heavy lifting to let consumers build webpages easily.
And that's in primary and secondary levels. You can get college-level "Computer Science" degrees having only demonstrated the ability to wire other people's code together. Again, a valuable vocational skill, but _not_ computer science.
I'll give you two opinions about why this happens. First, being able to write code is no more nor less useful than being able to fix plumbing - when it's useful, it's wicked useful, but if that's not your job, you'll probably never develop enough expertise to solve problems you actually see, as opposed to hypothetical classroom problems. Second, the instructors at the primary and secondary level generally don't themselves have enough understanding of the topic to be able to successfully teach it. Which isn't a bad thing, because as I said, it's not a worthwhile thing for most people to develop an understanding of the topic.
Of course, in the end this isn't really much different from many other topics taught in schools. Most people don't ever need to analyze a work of fiction, or calculate the remaining angle in a diagram from the given angles. A big difference is that geometry in 2050 is going to be very similar to geometry in 1750, so you can productively teach the skill based on hundreds of years of doing it, and insofar as it is useful at all, it will continue to be useful. Most of the vocational computer-related stuff they teach today didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago, and much of it won't be useful in 10 or 20 years. The decades-old stuff which is still useful to me as a professional is the esoteric knowledge, not the applied knowledge.
This is the most amazing thing I have ever heard! Scrapy is... a thing, which... does... stuff, and now I can use things which do stuff with Python... 3 is it? I can hardly contain my joy.
He never envisioned that, instead of a totalitarian government imposing viewscreens on everyone and then pounding the populace into submission, one could just offer "reality programming" on the viewscreens.
How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.
The right amount for you, which involves tracking your exercise and eating habits and looking at the results. If you want to gain weight, eat less than you have been eating, or exercise more than you have been exercising.
The entire point is that you can't build a calculator that will take everything into account. You have to treat yourself as an experiment of one.
In a world where the vast majority of people are _not_ out to get you, it simply doesn't matter if they could see some things in some cases. Maybe they're very good at it, so they see 10 true things bad guys are doing and 1 false thing bad guys aren't doing... plus 100,000 false things good guys aren't doing. Insofar as you have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is probably not useful, and if you don't have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is too noisy to be actionable.
It would work well if your psychics where absolutely spot on almost all the time, like 99.99% (if you have many thousands of them), and they could do directed seeing so you could have them check each other. But, honestly, in that case a cabal of psychics would already run the world, either through being very wealthy or by being able to blackmail the people who actually do run the world.
I totally agree. Would you give your kid your credit card, pat him on the head and then send him to the arcade? That's what this clueless putz did.
I think this case is more like "Hey, I know your dad, go ahead and play and I'll put it on his credit card for you."
Except it's really more like "Billy, see that kid over there? Let him play anything he wants for free, even the expensive stuff, we can charge it to his dad."
A 7-year-old kid isn't going to have a strong idea of when things are too good to be true in the first place, and the app store is a mixture of completely free games which are fun and free-to-play games which are designed by experts to trick you into spending money. The default should be opt-out with a prompt, not opt-in with a non-obvious setting somewhere to disable things.
I laughed- if only the MS employees knew that this subversive OS was the one making them their morning coffee (the lifeblood of every corporation) they'd probably be up in arms about it. lol
Seriously? They are probably busy working on important things rather than worrying about whether every random doorknob and lightbulb in the world runs their OS.
Well, at least since Ballmer moved on. He'd have probably decreed no cream because the salesperson sent by the dairy used a Mac.
Ten years ago, I was coding gnarly C++. Today it's even more gnarly because the projects are bigger and the problems more subtle. I think my only way out of this trap will be to make a conscious decision to stop, but even if I opt out, others will be in there doing the same basic stuff to make everything keep running.
The Objective-C knowledge I began developing in 1988 will probably be less useful in ten years, though. If you had asked me in 1995 if I would be intentionally avoiding Objective-C work in 2015 because of burnout, I would have laughed at you.
I hope that my Perl knowledge will be useless in ten years, but I fear that it will be the most lucrative system I know.
In the 80's, software-engineering was an optimistic industry, structured programming had helped so much, object-oriented programming seemed likely to make things easy, logic programming was going to automate a lot of stuff, we were going to move upstream to direct solvers and provers. Sometime in the 00's, everyone gave up and decided that optimism was overrated, software-engineering would never earn the "engineering" part, so instead let's just try to mitigate the vicious cycles to keep them from going too far foul. I think in ten years, things are going to look basically the same as today, with minor evolutionary additions, and we might even argue about whether things have changed enough to be worth talking about.
Hiring a programmer who doesn't know how to eliminate SQL injection is like hiring a surgeon who doesn't know how to use a scalpel
I'd say it's like hiring a surgeon who doesn't wash their hands before operations. Even if they otherwise do a bang-up job, they could still screw things up.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but what if bugs are the result of living in simulation? What if "base reality" is so much more such that it is possible for mathematics to be both complete and correct and has solutions for the halting problem? That would actually make it possible to eradicate all bugs in a system.
That's way out there. Once you have that, just ask the question you want answered, why bother with a simulation at all?
Also, the incompatibility between Einsteinian, classical and quantum physics is a pretty big "discrepancy" in the universe, and there may be more exotic physics to be found to explain Dark Matter and Energy.
This applies equally to all reality, though, so it's not a bug, it's a feature. Just because your user cannot understand a feature doesn't mean you didn't intend it to work that way. A bug is a thing that the creators of the software don't understand and didn't intend, and invariably you have a ton of bugs which don't happen uniformly, and thus are really challenging to fix. Reality doesn't have those.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
Whose to say there aren't bugs? As a physics major in college I could certainly be convinced many aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics could be considered bugs. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light? Oops. Quantum entanglement and superposition? We'll fix those in version 2.5. Hopefully by version 4 we can finally get the world to run by what you call Newtonian physics with no exceptions.
If a bug happens to everyone, it's damned easy to fix. But the annoying bugs don't. For the annoying bugs, 1% of your users are having the bug, their reports seem legit, but dozens of people have tried to reproduce it and can't. So you have evidence that someone's system is breaking the rules, you just can't see it.
It would be like if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and I can see exactly what you are doing to accomplish it, but I cannot go faster than the speed of light. It would be like if you reported that electroncs were a wave, and I reported that they were a particle, but we can never figure out why. THIS IS NOT HOW REALITY WORKS. Every time, it has turned out that differing experimental results are because the experiments were different, not because reality was different.
Let's say you have a computer program with 10,000 lines of code in it. How many bugs are there? OK, 100,000 lines, are there 10x as many bugs or 12x? 1M lines? Let's say you have a 10M-line computer program, there are going to be tens or hundreds of thousands of bugs in that thing.
How many bugs have we seen in reality? I don't mean "Oh, _that's_ interesting" and later we figure out general relativity - I mean bugs, the shit bluescreens, or if you look in a certain direction, things are different. How many have we found?
AFAICT, we've found _zero_. Every time we find a discrepency in the universe, later we figure out that it wasn't a discrepency, it's how the entire universe works, and our previous understanding was simply wrong. EVERY TIME. So either the bugs self-heal and become consistent universal features, or they weren't bugs in the first place.
If the universe is a self-organizing emergent property on some very fundamental operator, then I don't see how "simulated" differs from "real". We don't write software that way. We don't build hardware that way. I don't mean a little bit, I mean AT ALL, that's entirely alien to everything in software and hardware, to the point where you might as well be talking about something else entirely.
I changed my mind after reading the article, it's not a UI issue, the car gave the user a warning on the screen, and the user had a chance to cancel. Quote:
The driver was alerted of the Summon activation with an audible chime and a pop-up message on the center touchscreen display. At this time, the driver had the opportunity to cancel the action by pressing CANCEL on the center touchscreen display; however, the CANCEL button was not clicked by the driver. In the next second, the brake pedal was released and two seconds later, the driver exited the vehicle. Three seconds after that, the driver's door was closed, and another three seconds later, Summon activated pursuant to the driver's double-press activation request.
Yeah, this guy screwed it up (although it's kind of surprising how much information Tesla collects).
So his car was damaged by auto opt-in?
It still doesn't sit right with me - my skeptical gut tells me it is silly - but where is the flaw in the logic?
Why is there any reason to assign equivalent probabilities to random hypothetical cases? We have a single example of intelligent life, and all our other candidates share almost all the same genetic code, so we have no basis to even make estimates. We do anyhow, but until you have that second example, you can't tell if we're a one-in-10-light-years occurrence, once-in-a-galaxy, once-in-a-cluster, once-in-a-supercluster, or what.
Also, as of yet we have no examples of anyone successfully building a simulation capable of evolving intelligent life. It's possible that gross physical constraints on the scalability of computing will prevent us from ever managing such a simulation.
Certainly if the simulated system is smaller than the simulator and runs more slowly than the simulator's universe, then it becomes more likely that we live in a real universe. Say our universe is ~10^23 miles across, and we can build a simulator a million miles across. Say the simulator needs 1000 of our most basic reality components to simulate one sub-reality component, and the simulation runs at 1/1000 speed.
Similar thinking works WRT timeframe, can the simulator survive for long enough that the simulated universe can evolve? A factor of 1000 slowdown means that the simulator's universe is going to evolve a great deal in the time it takes the simulated universe to have humans on earth. Is it really reasonable to imagine a simulation running for that long? We can't even maintain a consistent computing system for decades.
I suspect the real quote was "Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am a public servant."
When a four-year old is hitting his brother over the head with a baseball bat, the solution isn't "Oh, he's a four-year old, that's just how they live life when they're four". You tell him to stop hitting his brother, and if he doesn't stop you progress to more and more serious consequences.
It's not any different than any number of other things someone might want to combine with watching a movie, such as sex, or lighting up a joint, or playing melodica. Figure out if your primary interest is watching a movie or texting, and if it's texting, go do it in the lobby or in the parking lot or some such shit.
rsnapshot is 7klines of Perl script around rsync which does _pull_ backups.
They never pass bit on.
When you say "99% of users never use a feature", then removing that feature makes sense. When you say that "99% of users never report the descriptive error code", and use that as justification to remove the error code entirely, then you guarantee that 100% of users cannot report helpful diagnostic information.
It's super annoying to have a problem with a piece of software, carefully record the details so you can debug things and maybe work towards fixing the problem, only to find that the provided error code is cover for a grab bag of completely unrelated issues. Not quite as annoying as having a reproducible failure case which you can't get across to the vendor because they setup a tech support firewall to protect them from bug reports.
I'm entirely serious. I've been blessed to work with some of the best software engineers in industry for a few decades, now, and I have come to the conclusion that security is simply a very hard problem, right there with locking and storing data. Talented engineers routinely write themselves insecure code and defend their code when you point out the problems, right up until you describe how to break it. At the university level, very few students will have the experience necessary to understand security issues except as a theoretical problem which likely happens to other people. Industry would receive far more benefit from things like courses on code testing.
Every intersection will have an autonomous vehicle to shuttle pedestrians across.
Or perhaps the police will just arrest them.
I'm very sorry to tell you so, but Apple needn't to create software that doesn't exist. It needs to modify an existing piece of software, called firmware that set a limit on the number of attempts with a wrong password before deleting data on the phone and it needs to remove the delay they introduced between attempts to avoid an automatic system to try passwords at a rate no human can. So, the piece of software exists and the modification is about two lines of code and maybe something like less than 10 characters to change in the code.
So if the government handed you a piece of paper and said "Read this into the microphone", you'd consider that not to be restricting your freedom of speech because you didn't have to actually create the message yourself?
This Apple software is written a certain way for reasons specific to the desired functionality. Just like you might choose specific words to get across your specific point, and might not agree to choose alternate words which make an entirely different point.
Well, it was the grammy awards. Not sure why you'd expect anything better.
They never seem to do studies about how the kids turn out who's parents were control-freaks and used things like "video games are evil" and "D&D is evil" and "pogs are evil" to force their kids into the line the parents want them to adhere to.
Admittedly, those are just the excuses those parents use, and as a society our approach seems to be "Well, kids are chattel, nothing we can do about it if their parents are horrible."
A good AI (outside of some sort of drama-like context imposing constraints on what works) should be configurable, to have as much or as little subservience as you want. That's what ownership means.Your computer should do whatever you want it to.
Personally, I'd rather my daily interactions were mostly with people who don't get off on having slaves. Indeed, that is none of my business, but my experience is that just because something is none of my business doesn't mean that bigots in turn keep their opinions to themselves. I'm sure it's possible that people who beat their kids or pets can be perfectly fine co-workers and otherwise upstanding citizens, but I think it's more likely that they'll be consistent bullies in many areas of their life.
When I was in school, a typing/keyboarding class was a pre-req for the computer classes. It was not at all necessary, I did not _actually_ learn to touch-type until a decade later, and at that point I did it because I decided it was stupid to be looking at the keyboard when I should be looking at the code. But, you know, thank goodness I got to waste that semester on something which was basically useless and which was trivial to learn once I decided I needed it.
Later, the "computer" classes in school had a strong dollop of learning how to use a word processor of spreadsheet. Which may be valuable vocational skills, but they were like a "Math for Living" class when the people forcing everyone to take them thought they were getting "Algebra II".
Even later, it was how to create a webpage. Because HTML is certainly the future and we'll never have WYSIWYG tools to do the heavy lifting to let consumers build webpages easily.
And that's in primary and secondary levels. You can get college-level "Computer Science" degrees having only demonstrated the ability to wire other people's code together. Again, a valuable vocational skill, but _not_ computer science.
I'll give you two opinions about why this happens. First, being able to write code is no more nor less useful than being able to fix plumbing - when it's useful, it's wicked useful, but if that's not your job, you'll probably never develop enough expertise to solve problems you actually see, as opposed to hypothetical classroom problems. Second, the instructors at the primary and secondary level generally don't themselves have enough understanding of the topic to be able to successfully teach it. Which isn't a bad thing, because as I said, it's not a worthwhile thing for most people to develop an understanding of the topic.
Of course, in the end this isn't really much different from many other topics taught in schools. Most people don't ever need to analyze a work of fiction, or calculate the remaining angle in a diagram from the given angles. A big difference is that geometry in 2050 is going to be very similar to geometry in 1750, so you can productively teach the skill based on hundreds of years of doing it, and insofar as it is useful at all, it will continue to be useful. Most of the vocational computer-related stuff they teach today didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago, and much of it won't be useful in 10 or 20 years. The decades-old stuff which is still useful to me as a professional is the esoteric knowledge, not the applied knowledge.
This is the most amazing thing I have ever heard! Scrapy is ... a thing, which ... does ... stuff, and now I can use things which do stuff with Python ... 3 is it? I can hardly contain my joy.
He never envisioned that, instead of a totalitarian government imposing viewscreens on everyone and then pounding the populace into submission, one could just offer "reality programming" on the viewscreens.
http://highexistence.com/amusi...
How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.
The right amount for you, which involves tracking your exercise and eating habits and looking at the results. If you want to gain weight, eat less than you have been eating, or exercise more than you have been exercising.
The entire point is that you can't build a calculator that will take everything into account. You have to treat yourself as an experiment of one.
In a world where the vast majority of people are _not_ out to get you, it simply doesn't matter if they could see some things in some cases. Maybe they're very good at it, so they see 10 true things bad guys are doing and 1 false thing bad guys aren't doing ... plus 100,000 false things good guys aren't doing. Insofar as you have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is probably not useful, and if you don't have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is too noisy to be actionable.
It would work well if your psychics where absolutely spot on almost all the time, like 99.99% (if you have many thousands of them), and they could do directed seeing so you could have them check each other. But, honestly, in that case a cabal of psychics would already run the world, either through being very wealthy or by being able to blackmail the people who actually do run the world.
Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and the oceans will eventually be depleted.
Bah, human activity cannot affect the operation of the earth!
I totally agree. Would you give your kid your credit card, pat him on the head and then send him to the arcade? That's what this clueless putz did.
I think this case is more like "Hey, I know your dad, go ahead and play and I'll put it on his credit card for you."
Except it's really more like "Billy, see that kid over there? Let him play anything he wants for free, even the expensive stuff, we can charge it to his dad."
A 7-year-old kid isn't going to have a strong idea of when things are too good to be true in the first place, and the app store is a mixture of completely free games which are fun and free-to-play games which are designed by experts to trick you into spending money. The default should be opt-out with a prompt, not opt-in with a non-obvious setting somewhere to disable things.
I laughed- if only the MS employees knew that this subversive OS was the one making them their morning coffee (the lifeblood of every corporation) they'd probably be up in arms about it. lol
Seriously? They are probably busy working on important things rather than worrying about whether every random doorknob and lightbulb in the world runs their OS.
Well, at least since Ballmer moved on. He'd have probably decreed no cream because the salesperson sent by the dairy used a Mac.
Ten years ago, I was coding gnarly C++. Today it's even more gnarly because the projects are bigger and the problems more subtle. I think my only way out of this trap will be to make a conscious decision to stop, but even if I opt out, others will be in there doing the same basic stuff to make everything keep running.
The Objective-C knowledge I began developing in 1988 will probably be less useful in ten years, though. If you had asked me in 1995 if I would be intentionally avoiding Objective-C work in 2015 because of burnout, I would have laughed at you.
I hope that my Perl knowledge will be useless in ten years, but I fear that it will be the most lucrative system I know.
In the 80's, software-engineering was an optimistic industry, structured programming had helped so much, object-oriented programming seemed likely to make things easy, logic programming was going to automate a lot of stuff, we were going to move upstream to direct solvers and provers. Sometime in the 00's, everyone gave up and decided that optimism was overrated, software-engineering would never earn the "engineering" part, so instead let's just try to mitigate the vicious cycles to keep them from going too far foul. I think in ten years, things are going to look basically the same as today, with minor evolutionary additions, and we might even argue about whether things have changed enough to be worth talking about.
Hiring a programmer who doesn't know how to eliminate SQL injection is like hiring a surgeon who doesn't know how to use a scalpel
I'd say it's like hiring a surgeon who doesn't wash their hands before operations. Even if they otherwise do a bang-up job, they could still screw things up.
[Though ... http://news.yahoo.com/clean-ha... ]