You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better.
I think companies are throwing money at advertising because they are using advertising revenues to construct their business models. So the more they collectively spend, the higher advertising prices go, and the better their business models look.
Step back and look at the wider picture though. What sets the price of X? Why is it, say, $1 to get 1 more customer and not 1c? If all the advertisers were companies that built fridges, then the value of X would settle at a price at or below the profit on every fridge they sell. If they go any higher they will be paying people to buy fridges which is not sustainable. However, if the advertisers are companies that are trying to acquire users so that they can make money from advertising, then each time they spend some more of their investor's funds on advertising, their revenue projections, which are the other side of X, go up. This makes their business plan look more viable and draws more investor money into the market. If these companies come to dominate the market, then you essentially have a ponzi scheme developing.
The only guard against this should be fiscal prudence by VCs and investors, but interest rates are zero the stock market is so awash with money it doesn't matter if this is all unsustainable as long as you exit through an IPO/sale before the music stops. In fact, it is an ingenious way to make obscene profits in an otherwise moribund economy.
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts. Just look at many of the tech companies now - they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.
Google worked, and will probably keep working for some time now, because one of the main use cases for search is to find stuff you want to buy. When you go to the site and start searching for a particular product, it isn't a big deal (and sometimes is useful) when ads come up for that product or equivalents you might not have heard off. The advertising has actual value in informing you about what is available. Other sites, such as Facebook, might have more information on me, but I go there to look at pictures of my friend's dogs and kids, not when I want to find something to buy. For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales. In that regard, the better tracking/conversion tools that the internet allows may be the industries own downfall.
I don't really see the benefit of them having ICBM capabilities. At the moment, for people in the USA and Europe, NK is just an annoying abstract threat. Nobody wants to go start anything there because they could probably take out Seoul and parts of Japan quite easily, so it is better to just monitor the situation and leave them alone. It would seem that they are getting some support from China as well, so doing something preemptive could end up getting messy very fast.
But if they get long range missile capabilities, we basically enter a new cold war standoff, and it is likely a lot more attention would be put on finding ways to shutdown the regime. Provoking the West into action just doesn't seem like it would be in their best interests. Having said that, the guy sounds like a complete crackpot, so maybe he is just bored.
I agree, but we need more than that - climate engineers who can figure out how to modify the system to prevent the worst effects. I think it's great that among the general population the narrative is to reduce emissions and environmental destruction, but nothing about the nature of humans convinces me that we won't eventually end up having to use engineered solutions to the problem.
Just look at the US elections. Every four years I see a bunch of politicians turn up in some coal town and spout on about how clean coal is the future. The mindset in these places is so hard to change, made especially so by the fud spread by vested interests. Given the rise of solar and electric, it might be possible to wean rich westerners off fossil fuels over a 30-50 year period, but I can't see how we will convince developing countries to do the same, especially when the price for fuels falls through the floor.
What really scares me is if a nation that starts suffering the effects of climate change first, gets desperate and takes matters into their own hands. It doesn't take many aerosols pumped into the atmosphere to potentially cause a lot of effects on the planet, and if we don't know what those effects are it could be a massive disaster in a very short time frame.
On dark nights with heavy rain, the white lines are invaluable for knowing where exactly the road is, and making an unexpected departure from the regular route.
This comment basically sums up the reason for doing this. Drivers now expect that transport engineers/councils should ensure they can blast down a road, rain or shine, day or night, busy or not, at 5mph above the posted speed limit (under the police threshold). It is their 'right', and if they can't then someone is to blame. The whole idea of this scheme is to make drivers realise they must constantly adjust their speed to the conditions, and that may very well mean travelling at speeds they believe are painfully slow.
I have driven on many of these sorts of roads in the UK. They are not motorways. Many times they are far from an ideal width due to historical concerns, and heavily shared by pedestrians and cyclists. It sounds like councils are taking a very pragmatic approach to trying to improve road safety for everyone and, provided they don't go out of control (in the end you have to accept some risk vs speed in a transport network) then it sounds like a good way forward.
I think AR will have a lot of uses, but in a marginal sort of way. Consider the rise of 3D CAD/CAM. We now have very complex organically shaped cars of exceptional build quality and safety, but fundamentally they don't make it any faster/easier to get around a city compared with their 1980s boxy counterparts. I can see AR being very useful for some professions, but it is not going to suddenly make people 50% more productive.
The real quality of life improvements for the 99% would come from investing in the last 20% of automation for things like food production, construction, plumbing etc. The sorts of things that 99%ers still toil away to produce or get a slice of. But while we have our current economic model, there is little incentive for the wealth holders to invest in that sort of productive tech vs shiny consumerist gimmick, because eliminating jobs just forces down the cost of labour to compete with your new robot, which reduces the marginal return on further automation. That is the problem with having an economy where the goal is full employment, and where you pitch capital against labour. It is essentially why we aren't all working 3 day weeks at the moment.
You missed the WW2 obsession as well. Honestly, the programming team at Discovery Networks have probably already cancelled any other content from 2039 to 2045 in rabid anticipation.
Look, the guy is amazing but he still has to ramp up production on the delayed Model X, get the Model 3 out, get the Falcon 9 landing and taking off again, finish the first giga factory and its extension, probably update the Model S by then, finish the hyper loop test track, get another giga factory started, convert the global energy supply to solar generation and local storage, fly and land the Falcon Heavy, scale Model 3 production up to 10 million cars a year, build a global micro satellite internet system, build another giga factory, send enough supplies to Mars to sustain a human habitat, build a Mars capable spaceship in orbit, and finally get himself to Mars before he becomes to senile to complete the trip.
As my mum always said, finish the project you're doing before you go start another one.
Further Apple doesn't bring its foreign profits home anyway, so what does it care how much its earnings would be in USD? It has Irish bank accounts rammed full of iPhone money (that the nice Irish govt didn't charge them tax on either), while constantly moaning that it can't bring any of that into USD unless Uncle Sam gives a big tax discount.
To confuse the Apple Troll mods, I'll add that Google is just as bad, and recently got exposed for doing a 'deal' with the UK govt to contribute a little bit towards us plebs.
Currency speculators, just like most high financiers, are complete sociopaths. They don't have sympathy for anyone.
Oh but they have sympathy for themselves. My observation is that as they get older and realise that nobody will mourn for them when they die, they quickly go into ultra-humanitarian legacy mode.
Honestly, they might as well replace all the workers in the trading system with robots. None of this produce real wealth anymore. The original idea of the stock exchange was to allocate capital efficiently from savers to businesses that could use it to create productivity growth. But we haven't had a capital constrained economy for almost two decades now. Banks can create whatever capital they want (or can fool you into believing in) using debt-equity fudges, and current negative real interest rates on cash indicate that the problem is not capital availability but consumer demand.
When you have no capital constraints the stock market 'value' is determined almost entirely by hype. Even worse, private equity funds are so big now that they can ensure the public exchanges never see any of the juiciest profit making companies until they are fully asset stripped and ready to pump and dump.
Modern corporations are really just clubs now. It used to be that an industrial mega-corp owned a huge quantity of capital equipment or physical resources, and this was what allowed them to keep out other competitors. If technology or tastes shifted, this capital equipment could quickly become a liability which would lead to their downfall.
However a tech company is really just a logo that attracts smart people and money from capital markets. Apple's products are not produced because they own the iPhone plantation. They are produced by talented people working continuously to design them. Most of these people are free to go work making phones for other people (or themselves) but while Apple has access to more money than other companies, they can retain the best workers, make the best products, and hence continue to be Apple.
If you want to take down one of the 'big five' the key now is to create a cult of personality that smart people will gravitate towards - like Elon Musk is doing. Then you can get talent from companies with deeper pockets, and eventually build a self-perpetuating club of your own.
This basically sums up the problem with the economy - it is gummed up with jobs that do not produce real wealth. Sure, lawyers will say that copyright laws are important because they give an incentive for real wealth creators to do stuff, but there is no natural law that ensures that the amount of human energy that goes into protecting existing wealth would not have produced a net greater benefit for society if it had been directed at creating new real wealth instead.
We've been here before many times. War, essentially, is a massive mobilisation of human effort in a completely pointless (in terms of net prosperity) way. After WW2 we finally started to learn to put our efforts towards building more stuff for everyone, instead of trying to find better ways to steal some other country's stuff, and for many years this was incredibly successful for humanity.
The more I've learnt about how the current financial and legal system works, the more I realise how naive us tech people are, busy working on making stuff. Most engineers I know are smart enough to clean up against the sorts of people who get a law or business degree, but we tend to be too idealistic about how the world works. In the end it's just sad that we live in an economic system where you are better off financially trading the same houses between each other, rather than going out and building new houses (or transport systems to open up areas for new housing).
Do you think that lawyers sit around lamenting the complexity of the legal system that means cases take years and thousands of hours of work to decide? Or that accountants sit around wishing the tax code was simplified to the point where a regular small business owner could prepare their returns themselves?
It may be a good thing for humanity if programmers create less work for themselves, but it is certainly not a good thing for the programming profession in the money-go-round that is banker-capitalism. It is a stupid system, but I can't really see it being changed any time soon. Sometimes I imagine the accountants/lawyers who pretty much run the economy just have a big laugh at idealistic programmers trying to do 'good' in their jobs.
My advice is that if you want to write good code, go work for yourself, where you can profit directly from reducing the time it takes you to maintain your programs. Otherwise, my advice is work for a really big hourly rate and don't get conned by 'job security' and a foosball table.
Install base. JavaScript is installed on almost every PC/mobile platform in existence, and has been in some shape or form for nearly a decade. You can't say the same about iOS, Windows, Python etc.
Sun tried to make Java into a universal platform, Adobe came close with Flash, and Microsoft had a go with Silverlight/.NET. None of these have endured in the same way JavaScript has. Why it did is a complex question.
JavaScript isn't as bad as you might think, but does require a lot of discipline (much like C++) to be done well. It definitely shouldn't be the universal language. I consider it really a high level language builder, rather than a high level language in itself. It is actually quite incredible that some newbie can naively bash out decently structured imperative code using it, while an advanced user creates quite well formed functional stuff. But, like C, the downside of this flexibility is that it is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot - something that I don't think should be a characteristic of a high level language.
Anyway, the way things are trending in the JavaScript world, eventually most people won't work directly in JavaScript but use derivative languages (such as CoffeeScript is doing now) better suited to their problem domain, so longer term you'll probably have your wish of developing in Python/C++ and then having that compiled to JavaScript. For now though, if you want the best performance (particular on mobile), you need to be developing in JavaScript and have a reasonable understanding of how the interpreter is working for you.
This is actually quite smart. When you have low skilled employees, a poor economy, and weak organised labour, making salary data available basically turns your employees on themselves. It would make it harder for a single employee to negotiate a higher salary, and general labour market conditions (outsourcing, unemployment etc) will keep aggregate salaries suppressed. Pretty much the opposite to why tech companies are so secretive about the astronomical amounts they have to pay technical staff.
As for those at the higher end of the scales - well, there are plenty of ways (many much more tax efficient) to 'pay' your executive team in something other than a salary. Most employees are not going to be able to understand why their company is running massive continuous share buy back programs while perpetually issuing the executive team with share options.
Perhaps, though Europeans still use a lot of cash. I think the bigger issue (and what makes Uber appeal to me) is knowing that the driver isn't going to be able to pull any number of tricks on you in an attempt to shake you down for more money. My most recent regular taxi experience was in Italy, where I waited at a taxi stand for 30 mins desperately trying to flag down numerous empty taxis. A local finally told me you had to ring and order one. I got a hotel to do this (they had to wait on hold for 10 mins), figuring all the taxi's I'd seen must have been on order, until I got in the one that arrived five minutes later and realised there was a EUR 7 'radio taxi' charge for ordering one.
It is these sorts of stupid tricks that really annoy people. I just want to be able to arrive somewhere, get a taxi, and not worry about the driver changing out my 50 note for a 5er, taking me the long way, or simply driving like an idiot and giving me no way to inform subsequent passengers that they are a dick.
The big value of uber is that it fixes these issues. If they ditched the stupid Ayn Rand techno-liberalism stuff then they could probably replace all the world's taxis just by fixing these endemic problems with getting into a vehicle with a stranger.
In addition, it is not even clear what real benefit Apple got from all those patents. The iPhone was copied by Samsung and Chinese manufacturers within a few years of release, but eight years on it is still creaming the lion's share of profit in the industry. Even in China, the land of knockoffs and a complete disregard for intellectual property, they are winning among those who can afford to pay for hipster value.
Apple has proven that you can fend of the competition in a highly competitive market much better using branding and shiny-shiny than a whole bunch of trivial technical patents that the average consumer doesn't give a stuff about.
The big tech players need to get together and stop this stupid patent war stuff. It isn't helping any of them, and just creates barriers for innovation and makes lawyers more valuable than people who actually make stuff. Google seems open to reform and Tesla has been quite progressive. If Apple joined in that might be enough to start building a real framework for IP protection that properly serves innovation.
Now that would be something really innovative, Mr Cook.
This is probably only for the older students, but a good one for sparking interest is the Monty Hall problem. It has a fun narrative (if you use the goat and car), and you can set up a mock game show with some students as the contestants to get them interested. You can walk through how the game works, and then debate whether it is better to change your choice or not to maximise your chance of getting the car. Once everyone has decided, you can then run a live simulation by giving each student a turn playing and calculate the probability from the results. Most people find it really shocking when they see the probabilities are so different, and it will get them thinking there might be more to this statistics thing than boring numbers.
The problem is all the corner cases needed to actually make the system safe in real world driving. That is highly non-trivial.
Indeed and that is what seems to be quite interesting about his approach. Basically he is saying that he is developing a system that can generate all those rules and corner cases itself, without a human having to quantify each scenario and code the rules into the machine. He states in the video that the car has gotten to where it is now (basic highway driving) by teaching itself. If it has, and his approach is extendable, then this is quite an interesting solution to the problem, precisely because it may deal with the non-trivialities you describe in a, well, comparatively trivial way.
Unfortunately, based on the article and video, there isn't really any way to determine whether he will be able to extend his system to give better performance, or even whether his system is just one of those 'learning systems' that is actually so highly tuned to the problem domain that it is essentially just an obfuscated rule based program. I guess we will have to wait for it to either get better, or for him to release some more information.
The main thing that makes me suspicious is why he has gone to the media about this now. If he has gotten this far with a design that actually does use learning, then why not spend a bit longer and get it to the point where he can demo it in less predictable environments. That would get us all interested. As it stands his current system only works in very predictable situations, so without more information it is impossible to know if this is a scam or not.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that companies are naively throwing money at advertising because they don't know any better.
I think companies are throwing money at advertising because they are using advertising revenues to construct their business models. So the more they collectively spend, the higher advertising prices go, and the better their business models look.
Step back and look at the wider picture though. What sets the price of X? Why is it, say, $1 to get 1 more customer and not 1c? If all the advertisers were companies that built fridges, then the value of X would settle at a price at or below the profit on every fridge they sell. If they go any higher they will be paying people to buy fridges which is not sustainable. However, if the advertisers are companies that are trying to acquire users so that they can make money from advertising, then each time they spend some more of their investor's funds on advertising, their revenue projections, which are the other side of X, go up. This makes their business plan look more viable and draws more investor money into the market. If these companies come to dominate the market, then you essentially have a ponzi scheme developing.
The only guard against this should be fiscal prudence by VCs and investors, but interest rates are zero the stock market is so awash with money it doesn't matter if this is all unsustainable as long as you exit through an IPO/sale before the music stops. In fact, it is an ingenious way to make obscene profits in an otherwise moribund economy.
I think the whole advertising situation will get better once the tech bubble bursts. Just look at many of the tech companies now - they are giant advertising platforms, but spend most of their revenues and investor money on user acquisition through advertising. This is like a giant ponzi scheme really.
Google worked, and will probably keep working for some time now, because one of the main use cases for search is to find stuff you want to buy. When you go to the site and start searching for a particular product, it isn't a big deal (and sometimes is useful) when ads come up for that product or equivalents you might not have heard off. The advertising has actual value in informing you about what is available. Other sites, such as Facebook, might have more information on me, but I go there to look at pictures of my friend's dogs and kids, not when I want to find something to buy. For that reason I find their ads incredibly annoying, and despite Zuckerberg going on about how they make them relevant, he would only be true if I was some kind of consumption machine that wonders around the internet like a virtual godzilla eating up every product that is shoved in my face.
My prediction is that eventually the industry will fall apart as companies realise the ponzi nature of current advertising prices, and that much of this expenditure is not converting in to sales. In that regard, the better tracking/conversion tools that the internet allows may be the industries own downfall.
I don't really see the benefit of them having ICBM capabilities. At the moment, for people in the USA and Europe, NK is just an annoying abstract threat. Nobody wants to go start anything there because they could probably take out Seoul and parts of Japan quite easily, so it is better to just monitor the situation and leave them alone. It would seem that they are getting some support from China as well, so doing something preemptive could end up getting messy very fast.
But if they get long range missile capabilities, we basically enter a new cold war standoff, and it is likely a lot more attention would be put on finding ways to shutdown the regime. Provoking the West into action just doesn't seem like it would be in their best interests. Having said that, the guy sounds like a complete crackpot, so maybe he is just bored.
Everybody on the gravy train! This is going to be 10x better than Y2K, and afterwards we'll have 2038 to cash in on.
I agree, but we need more than that - climate engineers who can figure out how to modify the system to prevent the worst effects. I think it's great that among the general population the narrative is to reduce emissions and environmental destruction, but nothing about the nature of humans convinces me that we won't eventually end up having to use engineered solutions to the problem.
Just look at the US elections. Every four years I see a bunch of politicians turn up in some coal town and spout on about how clean coal is the future. The mindset in these places is so hard to change, made especially so by the fud spread by vested interests. Given the rise of solar and electric, it might be possible to wean rich westerners off fossil fuels over a 30-50 year period, but I can't see how we will convince developing countries to do the same, especially when the price for fuels falls through the floor.
What really scares me is if a nation that starts suffering the effects of climate change first, gets desperate and takes matters into their own hands. It doesn't take many aerosols pumped into the atmosphere to potentially cause a lot of effects on the planet, and if we don't know what those effects are it could be a massive disaster in a very short time frame.
On dark nights with heavy rain, the white lines are invaluable for knowing where exactly the road is, and making an unexpected departure from the regular route.
This comment basically sums up the reason for doing this. Drivers now expect that transport engineers/councils should ensure they can blast down a road, rain or shine, day or night, busy or not, at 5mph above the posted speed limit (under the police threshold). It is their 'right', and if they can't then someone is to blame. The whole idea of this scheme is to make drivers realise they must constantly adjust their speed to the conditions, and that may very well mean travelling at speeds they believe are painfully slow.
I have driven on many of these sorts of roads in the UK. They are not motorways. Many times they are far from an ideal width due to historical concerns, and heavily shared by pedestrians and cyclists. It sounds like councils are taking a very pragmatic approach to trying to improve road safety for everyone and, provided they don't go out of control (in the end you have to accept some risk vs speed in a transport network) then it sounds like a good way forward.
What Microsoft intends to do with SwiftKey is not clear just yet
Ruin it, then stuff it full of Windows/Office money in the vain hope that this will hide their incompetence at diversifying.
I think AR will have a lot of uses, but in a marginal sort of way. Consider the rise of 3D CAD/CAM. We now have very complex organically shaped cars of exceptional build quality and safety, but fundamentally they don't make it any faster/easier to get around a city compared with their 1980s boxy counterparts. I can see AR being very useful for some professions, but it is not going to suddenly make people 50% more productive.
The real quality of life improvements for the 99% would come from investing in the last 20% of automation for things like food production, construction, plumbing etc. The sorts of things that 99%ers still toil away to produce or get a slice of. But while we have our current economic model, there is little incentive for the wealth holders to invest in that sort of productive tech vs shiny consumerist gimmick, because eliminating jobs just forces down the cost of labour to compete with your new robot, which reduces the marginal return on further automation. That is the problem with having an economy where the goal is full employment, and where you pitch capital against labour. It is essentially why we aren't all working 3 day weeks at the moment.
You missed the WW2 obsession as well. Honestly, the programming team at Discovery Networks have probably already cancelled any other content from 2039 to 2045 in rabid anticipation.
Look, the guy is amazing but he still has to ramp up production on the delayed Model X, get the Model 3 out, get the Falcon 9 landing and taking off again, finish the first giga factory and its extension, probably update the Model S by then, finish the hyper loop test track, get another giga factory started, convert the global energy supply to solar generation and local storage, fly and land the Falcon Heavy, scale Model 3 production up to 10 million cars a year, build a global micro satellite internet system, build another giga factory, send enough supplies to Mars to sustain a human habitat, build a Mars capable spaceship in orbit, and finally get himself to Mars before he becomes to senile to complete the trip.
As my mum always said, finish the project you're doing before you go start another one.
Further Apple doesn't bring its foreign profits home anyway, so what does it care how much its earnings would be in USD? It has Irish bank accounts rammed full of iPhone money (that the nice Irish govt didn't charge them tax on either), while constantly moaning that it can't bring any of that into USD unless Uncle Sam gives a big tax discount.
To confuse the Apple Troll mods, I'll add that Google is just as bad, and recently got exposed for doing a 'deal' with the UK govt to contribute a little bit towards us plebs.
Currency speculators, just like most high financiers, are complete sociopaths. They don't have sympathy for anyone.
Oh but they have sympathy for themselves. My observation is that as they get older and realise that nobody will mourn for them when they die, they quickly go into ultra-humanitarian legacy mode.
Honestly, they might as well replace all the workers in the trading system with robots. None of this produce real wealth anymore. The original idea of the stock exchange was to allocate capital efficiently from savers to businesses that could use it to create productivity growth. But we haven't had a capital constrained economy for almost two decades now. Banks can create whatever capital they want (or can fool you into believing in) using debt-equity fudges, and current negative real interest rates on cash indicate that the problem is not capital availability but consumer demand.
When you have no capital constraints the stock market 'value' is determined almost entirely by hype. Even worse, private equity funds are so big now that they can ensure the public exchanges never see any of the juiciest profit making companies until they are fully asset stripped and ready to pump and dump.
The real story here is that Larry Ellison is still bitching about his 'stolen' Java API.
Modern corporations are really just clubs now. It used to be that an industrial mega-corp owned a huge quantity of capital equipment or physical resources, and this was what allowed them to keep out other competitors. If technology or tastes shifted, this capital equipment could quickly become a liability which would lead to their downfall.
However a tech company is really just a logo that attracts smart people and money from capital markets. Apple's products are not produced because they own the iPhone plantation. They are produced by talented people working continuously to design them. Most of these people are free to go work making phones for other people (or themselves) but while Apple has access to more money than other companies, they can retain the best workers, make the best products, and hence continue to be Apple.
If you want to take down one of the 'big five' the key now is to create a cult of personality that smart people will gravitate towards - like Elon Musk is doing. Then you can get talent from companies with deeper pockets, and eventually build a self-perpetuating club of your own.
This basically sums up the problem with the economy - it is gummed up with jobs that do not produce real wealth. Sure, lawyers will say that copyright laws are important because they give an incentive for real wealth creators to do stuff, but there is no natural law that ensures that the amount of human energy that goes into protecting existing wealth would not have produced a net greater benefit for society if it had been directed at creating new real wealth instead.
We've been here before many times. War, essentially, is a massive mobilisation of human effort in a completely pointless (in terms of net prosperity) way. After WW2 we finally started to learn to put our efforts towards building more stuff for everyone, instead of trying to find better ways to steal some other country's stuff, and for many years this was incredibly successful for humanity.
The more I've learnt about how the current financial and legal system works, the more I realise how naive us tech people are, busy working on making stuff. Most engineers I know are smart enough to clean up against the sorts of people who get a law or business degree, but we tend to be too idealistic about how the world works. In the end it's just sad that we live in an economic system where you are better off financially trading the same houses between each other, rather than going out and building new houses (or transport systems to open up areas for new housing).
Do you think that lawyers sit around lamenting the complexity of the legal system that means cases take years and thousands of hours of work to decide? Or that accountants sit around wishing the tax code was simplified to the point where a regular small business owner could prepare their returns themselves?
It may be a good thing for humanity if programmers create less work for themselves, but it is certainly not a good thing for the programming profession in the money-go-round that is banker-capitalism. It is a stupid system, but I can't really see it being changed any time soon. Sometimes I imagine the accountants/lawyers who pretty much run the economy just have a big laugh at idealistic programmers trying to do 'good' in their jobs.
My advice is that if you want to write good code, go work for yourself, where you can profit directly from reducing the time it takes you to maintain your programs. Otherwise, my advice is work for a really big hourly rate and don't get conned by 'job security' and a foosball table.
Install base. JavaScript is installed on almost every PC/mobile platform in existence, and has been in some shape or form for nearly a decade. You can't say the same about iOS, Windows, Python etc.
Sun tried to make Java into a universal platform, Adobe came close with Flash, and Microsoft had a go with Silverlight/.NET. None of these have endured in the same way JavaScript has. Why it did is a complex question.
JavaScript isn't as bad as you might think, but does require a lot of discipline (much like C++) to be done well. It definitely shouldn't be the universal language. I consider it really a high level language builder, rather than a high level language in itself. It is actually quite incredible that some newbie can naively bash out decently structured imperative code using it, while an advanced user creates quite well formed functional stuff. But, like C, the downside of this flexibility is that it is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot - something that I don't think should be a characteristic of a high level language.
Anyway, the way things are trending in the JavaScript world, eventually most people won't work directly in JavaScript but use derivative languages (such as CoffeeScript is doing now) better suited to their problem domain, so longer term you'll probably have your wish of developing in Python/C++ and then having that compiled to JavaScript. For now though, if you want the best performance (particular on mobile), you need to be developing in JavaScript and have a reasonable understanding of how the interpreter is working for you.
This is actually quite smart. When you have low skilled employees, a poor economy, and weak organised labour, making salary data available basically turns your employees on themselves. It would make it harder for a single employee to negotiate a higher salary, and general labour market conditions (outsourcing, unemployment etc) will keep aggregate salaries suppressed. Pretty much the opposite to why tech companies are so secretive about the astronomical amounts they have to pay technical staff.
As for those at the higher end of the scales - well, there are plenty of ways (many much more tax efficient) to 'pay' your executive team in something other than a salary. Most employees are not going to be able to understand why their company is running massive continuous share buy back programs while perpetually issuing the executive team with share options.
People like the cashless society
Perhaps, though Europeans still use a lot of cash. I think the bigger issue (and what makes Uber appeal to me) is knowing that the driver isn't going to be able to pull any number of tricks on you in an attempt to shake you down for more money. My most recent regular taxi experience was in Italy, where I waited at a taxi stand for 30 mins desperately trying to flag down numerous empty taxis. A local finally told me you had to ring and order one. I got a hotel to do this (they had to wait on hold for 10 mins), figuring all the taxi's I'd seen must have been on order, until I got in the one that arrived five minutes later and realised there was a EUR 7 'radio taxi' charge for ordering one.
It is these sorts of stupid tricks that really annoy people. I just want to be able to arrive somewhere, get a taxi, and not worry about the driver changing out my 50 note for a 5er, taking me the long way, or simply driving like an idiot and giving me no way to inform subsequent passengers that they are a dick.
The big value of uber is that it fixes these issues. If they ditched the stupid Ayn Rand techno-liberalism stuff then they could probably replace all the world's taxis just by fixing these endemic problems with getting into a vehicle with a stranger.
In addition, it is not even clear what real benefit Apple got from all those patents. The iPhone was copied by Samsung and Chinese manufacturers within a few years of release, but eight years on it is still creaming the lion's share of profit in the industry. Even in China, the land of knockoffs and a complete disregard for intellectual property, they are winning among those who can afford to pay for hipster value.
Apple has proven that you can fend of the competition in a highly competitive market much better using branding and shiny-shiny than a whole bunch of trivial technical patents that the average consumer doesn't give a stuff about.
The big tech players need to get together and stop this stupid patent war stuff. It isn't helping any of them, and just creates barriers for innovation and makes lawyers more valuable than people who actually make stuff. Google seems open to reform and Tesla has been quite progressive. If Apple joined in that might be enough to start building a real framework for IP protection that properly serves innovation.
Now that would be something really innovative, Mr Cook.
This is probably only for the older students, but a good one for sparking interest is the Monty Hall problem. It has a fun narrative (if you use the goat and car), and you can set up a mock game show with some students as the contestants to get them interested. You can walk through how the game works, and then debate whether it is better to change your choice or not to maximise your chance of getting the car. Once everyone has decided, you can then run a live simulation by giving each student a turn playing and calculate the probability from the results. Most people find it really shocking when they see the probabilities are so different, and it will get them thinking there might be more to this statistics thing than boring numbers.
The problem is all the corner cases needed to actually make the system safe in real world driving. That is highly non-trivial.
Indeed and that is what seems to be quite interesting about his approach. Basically he is saying that he is developing a system that can generate all those rules and corner cases itself, without a human having to quantify each scenario and code the rules into the machine. He states in the video that the car has gotten to where it is now (basic highway driving) by teaching itself. If it has, and his approach is extendable, then this is quite an interesting solution to the problem, precisely because it may deal with the non-trivialities you describe in a, well, comparatively trivial way.
Unfortunately, based on the article and video, there isn't really any way to determine whether he will be able to extend his system to give better performance, or even whether his system is just one of those 'learning systems' that is actually so highly tuned to the problem domain that it is essentially just an obfuscated rule based program. I guess we will have to wait for it to either get better, or for him to release some more information.
The main thing that makes me suspicious is why he has gone to the media about this now. If he has gotten this far with a design that actually does use learning, then why not spend a bit longer and get it to the point where he can demo it in less predictable environments. That would get us all interested. As it stands his current system only works in very predictable situations, so without more information it is impossible to know if this is a scam or not.
(1) I meant 'Big Corporate' as a colloquial pronoun, so the real error was not capitalising to indicate this. (2) Yes.
On the other hand, this is Slashdot. You must have lost your way from The Grauniad.