For instance, buffer overflows. Why is it possible to overflow a buffer?
This happens when the programmer has to expressly deal with all the memory management aspects (i.e., allocating enough memory before using a variable and releasing it afterwards) in languages like C. There is no real difference between this or other kind of bugs: outputs of a wrongly-built piece of software. The reason why it is much more difficult to see these errors nowadays is that more modern programming language take care of all the memory management automatically. Including this automatic memory management part consumes resources and this is one of the reasons why these language are heavier/slower than C. These more modern languages can still be misused and create buggy software, but they are usually much more programmer-friendly (what is a quite personal assessment anyway).
Given that, I have every expectation that you may not know basic meanings of the word "science". You may not have been able to realize it yet, at least you have not acknowledged it yet.
LOL. This last post has been so funny and descriptive of your behaviour (and what you represent) that I will better break my intention (one last time, hopefully) of not saying you anything else and will be much clearer than so far.
I have tried to be polite, to rely on ideas on the lines of "it isn't you, it is me", even though I am quite a quite honest and straightforward person; but this has been clearly a very bad idea. See, I have met many people like you, all of them equally wrong if not about their approach to life (who am I to arbitrarily determine how people should behave?) about what others (or at least, myself and other people similar to me) think about them and about how relevant their contribution might be. Do you want me to be completely honest regarding what I think about your whole contribution to this conversation (and probably to many other situations)? It has been 100% negative. People like you systematically invade everyone around them, self-elevate themselves to absolute authorities (despite usually having numerous lacks), reduce the value/interest of all what they touch and never accept nice and polite "warnings" or even the results themselves. You come in with whatever idea is in your mind and the blind conviction that that idea has to be imposed no matter what and nothing else is good for you. Your behaviour can provoke only two possible outputs: either hypocrisy, unfair-/arbitrary-/nepotism-, ignorance/fear-based, honest (not precisely the most common outcome) agreement or chaos. IMO, the best reaction is being extremely (even aggressively) clear when someone like you appears and this is exactly what I should have done since the very first second. Thanks for helping me remember that being generous and (kind of hypocritical) polite with people like you is a very bad idea.
Now, you can continue having this discussion with yourself. Hopefully, you will appreciate me having written so many words which you can easily take completely out of context, adapt to whatever fear/complex you might have this month and basically continue living in your in-denial world where all what matters is whatever idea happens to be in your head in that moment. In case you have any problem to easily rely on whatever abstract prejudice you might be using this time to justify your behaviour and blame me/what I represent, you should ask me for more information (gender, race, country, education, occupation, income, marital status, political views, expectations, etc.); and I will do all what I can to help you continue caring about yourself and your in-denial crusade. LOL.
Are you trying to prove me wrong in my assumption that the most likely outcome of continuing with this discussion was going nowhere? Because, pragmatically speaking, you are doing a terrible job. LOL. Seriously, I am not trying to be offensive or impolite; it seems quite clear to me the kind of conversation you are after and I am not interested in it. I think that my original point should be properly understood by anyone interested in doing so. I know that some people enjoy getting involved in long discussions about issues which are only accessorily related to accomplishing the given goal (properly understanding my point and, eventually, (dis)agreeing with it). I respect everyone's expectations and don't want to impose my approach; but also expect everyone else to respect my position. Again, I am not interested in continuing talking about irrelevant-to-me issues and that's why I will stop this chat here.
I don't agree with some of your statements, not even with the main ideas underlying your post. In general, I don't agree with virtually any absolute statement expected to be applicable to a so wide number of different people (engineers! What includes tons of different specialities, even those whose definition as engineering might be arguable, knowledge, personalities, expectations, etc.; same thing for scientists). I don't even agree with your signature promoting idealism over pragmatism (I do have default expectations like absolute fairness/honesty being the best approaches, all people being intrinsically identical, etc., but I also accept a reality proving them wrong under certain conditions)! So, I don't see the point of continuing a discussion which is very unlikely to get anywhere because of our evident differences. See? I cannot refrain myself from being pragmatic, an attitude which you don't like too much:)
And why are so many faulty pieces of software, websites even developed/used by people/companies with much more than enough resources? Incompetent, ignorant, careless, etc. attitudes systematically promoted at different levels by a system infected by arbitrariness since quite a few years ago when the big amounts of money came in and, with it, all the people only seeing software development as means (which they don't know/like) to an end (= money); a situation which, ironically, might have been tremendously beneficial if everyone had focused on what they are good at.
You can take as a reference my personal recent experiences. I am a senior programmer with a very heterogeneous background currently exclusively interested in working under high-quality/technically-demanding conditions. I am more than willing to prove my knowledge, skills, attitude at work, even by spending a relevant amount of time, but I am systematically not allowed to do so!! All what I find are random tests mostly focused on ridiculously small amounts of time (this is exactly how you can assess what a person knows! By setting up completely unrealistic conditions and forcing that person to get trained in that specific format, cheat it or prove irrelevant-for-the-job skills), abstract questions expecting very specific absolute-truth like answers (!!), looking at your public contributions in an extremely simplistic way (analysis performed mostly via counting stars, likes and emojis) or any other ridiculous resource meant to provide the fake impression that a person without knowledge can seriously assess what an expert knows. And all that without forgetting about random assumptions, prejudices and any other arbitrary output basically defining a system where the gatekeepers only let in those saying exactly what they want to hear: mantras of either very low applicability or requiring a proper analysis which never happens. Basically, unkowledgeable people deciding who are (not) knowledgeable?!
I have many other experiences on different fronts but all of them depict the same ridiculous reality: a so relevant field requiring a relevant amount of knowledge and a very specific attitude which is being managed at almost every level by people with virtually no knowledge and not even liking anything of that (thinking that the technical skills are secondary?!). Having so many problems you ask? I wonder why we are not seeing much more than that. In fact, I am pretty sure that there are lots of problems which either don't get any publicity or haven't been discovered yet. Lots of problems is the normal outcome of a highly specialised critical subfield cluelessly managed by unknowledgeable people. I am not saying that the software development industry has no place for non-technical skills, but all these people should synchronise their activity with the reality and never forget that the ultimate goal of their activity is to make sure that the technical aspects (about which they know pretty much nothing and might even not like) are being adequately managed.
Curiously, I have never got this kind of nonsensical bulk spam in Spanish despite being a Spaniard myself currently living in Spain! Other than the languages I cannot understand as what is being shown in the link above, most of the spam of this sort which I get is in English.
blasting this stuff out to harvested email addresses
Yes, I guess that this is the most logical explanation: blindly targeting random email addresses. But such a level of carelessness seems ridiculously inefficient for them, even by bearing in mind that spamming in this way is already too inefficient (who is nowadays caring about anything of what one of these emails say?). At least, they should make sure that they send their crap to people able to understand it and, ideally, interested in whatever they are offering.
Although your whole post is a bit too melodramatic, recent events seem to kind of prove that it might not be as crazy as might seem at first sight. In any case and luckily for me, I don't have any kind of reputation to damage (other than the technical/professional one which actually shouldn't be immune to my incompetence) or any ideas, actions, expectations, etc. to hide (right the contrary: lots of things to share, mainly to help certain clueless idiots understand that they should better avoid dealing with me). Actually, my behaviour has been becoming increasingly careless about all that during the last times. Anyone can find lots of stuff about me that, at first sight and for some people, might not look too good; on the other hand, I don't care about those people, their concerns and much less about their (non-existing) authority. I correct any error as soon as I realise about it. I update my behaviour/expectations as much and as regularly as possible, every time by doing what I consider best under the given conditions. Out of all the forms of stupidity, I despise fanatics the most; and out of all their possible versions, the coward, behind-the-back, in-group, getting-everything-out-of-context, always-looking-for-unfair-advantages, etc. ones. And I will always support these "individuals" to be disrespected, ridiculed and even bashed. I always expect everyone to be fully responsible for all what they do, but expect way much more of those daring to have a so pathetic attitude toward anyone (= doubt and conspire all what you want, but better be ready for the very-bad-for-your consequences if case that you were wrong).
In case of having children (I still have to find the required second half and am quite demanding; so, not too sure on this front), I will make sure that they grow knowledgeable and fearless. I will do all what is my power to help them become fully-aware persons actively contributing to make the world a better place. That world you predict isn't a world for me, for my children or for any person with a bit of self respect and knowledge. In the extremely unlikely scenario of such an eventually to ever happen, I would be joining whatever resisting movement is available (or creating my own!) and, hopefully, my kids will join me.
Nowadays and in rich countries, problems on these lines are usually accepted or, at least, tolerated by the victims; or even better: the victim already did (or probably will do) something similar. You know what they say: live by the sword, die by the sword. If you are a politician, show business celebrity or similar, perhaps you should be very careful when choosing allies/enemies and, if you have something to hide, better start thinking about how to deal with the eventual publicity. I am not part of this and will never be. I have nothing to do even with low-level hypocrites, standard conformists. I am an outsider even within the software development industry (IMO, much more concerned about non-technical aspects than it should be). Anyone wanting to prove that I am not compatible with whatever PC trend should find more than enough references after a short research (or could contact me and I would provide whatever is needed), but this is almost a badge of honour for me. I might be poor, have lots of debts, find lots of difficulties to get clients, over-work a lot and my whole activity might be systematically under-appraised, but I am very proud of what I am, think, do and every single step I have taken. There is no buts, no "will tolerate this little thing on exchange of getting whatever" to be ashamed, no even slightly dishonest or unfair actions. I have made tons of mistakes, but every time by thinking that I was doing the right thing in that moment and by trying to correct them/accept the consequences.
Some people cannot understand why I do things as I do. They cannot understand the tremendous value of always doing what you think that should do by being as fair, honest, respectful to others and, at work work, objective/professional as possible. Nothing to hide, not
You don't need to form falsifiable hypotheses and construct controlled tests to eliminate support for the hypothesis just to build a bridge, but you *do* need to be able to do the math required to ensure that the correct materials are used in the correct way.
Applying the scientific method, although a sensible proceeding in many cases, is certainly not seen as a requirement in quite a few engineering scenarios. But relying on the same methodologies than scientists do isn't the same than knowing/applying science. To build a bridge or (better and more according to my personal expertise) a machine, you have to systematically rely on physics, either the default versions or engineering ones adapted to the specific conditions. The physics knowledge of a physics-related engineer is very important and same thing for any other branch.
Being a whizz at the numbers and having a thorough materials reference does not make someone a scientist.
I haven't ever met an engineer dreaming about being called scientist or vice versa. The fact of having a relevant background on the associated scientific field doesn't mean that an engineer's work has anything to do with a scientist's one. That's why we have scientists and engineers. But your "most engineers are pretty damn useless at science", at least as per my understanding, denotes having a limited knowledge/not agreeing with whatever scientific field is applicable and this is certainly not the case. If you only meant doing scientist-kind-of work (dressing white lab coats and playing around with pipettes. LOL) then I guess that you are right and engineers are quite bad at that.
You don't need a belief in science to be a good engineer - most engineers are pretty damn useless at science.
This seems a quite inaccurate statement as far engineering is basically applied science. And similarly to what happens with most of applied branches, its whole point is to apply a theory about which you need a quite good knowledge and which you might even correct/extend via empirical validation. A different story would be talking about bastardised/extreme versions of science/engineering: getting the scientific/engineering label pretty much arbitrarily or theory-with-no-real-applicability (is this science at all?) / very-specific-implementation (is this engineering at all?).
Capturing my keypresses without my permit would be illegal almost everywhere.
The most ironic part is that you have most likely given your permission, but only in a generic or even just implicit way. Additionally, most of users aren't even completely aware about what web-based anything basically implies: browsing through files stored on a third-party computer, where every action can be easily tracked and stored. Another aspect to bear in mind is that a big proportion of modern functionalities do need to rely on visitor's information; temporary and without-allowing-access-to-anyone-else data gathering should be fine.
In summary, what is required is much more control on the visitor data non-temporary storage, sharing and usage fronts. Also clearer/express indications (and ideally the option to freely reject non-essential data collection; now, you are usually forced to accept everything in order to use whatever application) about what is happening with your data at each point like via a popup before using whatever functionality.
My current position about privacy is acceptation of the reality (everyone, everywhere dealing with my a-priori-not-too-relevant data without my express consent) + neither liking nor really minding it. The key issue allowing me to think in that way is knowing what is being mostly done with that data now and in the near future: not too much.
Most of big-data efforts have been focusing on gathering and managing, but not on properly understanding; that's why and despite its huge potential value, most of this information isn't being properly maximised. In any case, I certainly don't support any kind of against-intention-of-user actions, I have never developed or used anything on so invasive lines and look forward to legislations to keeping up with all what is happening on the online/software privacy front.
I haven't been getting too much spam since quite long time ago. But the one I get is very weird like the one which I received right now (Slashdot doesn't support those characters).
I have been getting an email similar to that one about 2-5 times per week for over the last quite a few months. They are always written in a language I cannot understand (sorry about that, obsessive spammers, but I can only understand Spanish, English and bit of German) and usually include the word SPAM in the title!! I have never replied to any of them, visited anything referred by them or even made the tiniest effort to translate what they say.
existing software project doing data processing using explicit programming logic, and the team charged with maintaining it find they can replace it with a deep-learning-based solution
So, that team relied on a pre-made code to deal with a specific part of the implementation! Why is this news? Although I personally prefer to develop most of the (data-management) algorithms myself, relying on third-party dependencies is a quite common and acceptable proceeding in software development.
Also note that I am a man (and have been like this since I was born), wear glasses, my hair is blond(-ish) and my height/weight is around 185 cm/75 kg. Anyone interested in knowing more about these or any other of my generic features (completely irrelevant for the points I made in the comments above and for my online activity as a whole, eminently focused on my work as a programmer/engineer) should better try to avoid dealing with me. Someone might think that the fact of having replaced all my pictures with a logo is already quite indicative of what I think on this front, but that person would be wrong: as internet has taught me, nothing is evident/easy enough for some people.
Just in case that point isn't clear and someone considers it relevant here, note that I am white. At least, I look white like all my family does, although we Spaniards are quite mixed people because Spain has been invaded by virtually everyone feeling like invading something. LOL. In any case, I guess that this is also true for many people almost everywhere, what kind of seem to weaken even further abstract race-based claims.
you make a bunch of assertions without proof or reasons.
There is no available data to perform the corresponding calculations, but I think that my statements can be intuitively confirmed. Just take any gun as a reference to understand the minimum size/weight requirements, notably higher than what is being displayed in the video. Without forgetting that you need all the 3D movement operating electronics. I am intentionally ignoring the AI part because, at this point, creating a bot able to move more or less autonomously as shown in the video is simply impossible.
Grape sized drones exist, that's why I specified the size
I don't doubt that. But they certainly cannot shoot bullets which might go through a skull.
Neurotoxin that are lethal in microgram quantities exist
My comment was focused on the physical requirements of a flying object to shoot/inject something anywhere: relevant force/pressure (momentum) which cannot be generated unless reacting against something (= opposing weight/mass). Coming up with some kind of suicide bot might be relatively easily (making sure that it hits the target might be quite difficult though), but a reusable one is a completely different story. Think about what a mosquito does: even by ignoring the difficulty associated with landing in a random location, you need to exert a relevant pressure. Emulating the required actions/muscles at such a micro-scale seems really difficult.
Having a swarm of these attacking a crowd is just an engineering challenge of moderate difficulty.
Bots of that small size and being reusable is, as explained, either extremely difficult or practically impossible. It would be much easier to create much bigger ones shooting whatever projectiles.
The size is a very relevant aspect. Firstly, you need some space to store all the required electronics. Secondly, you cannot generate enough force without reaction/inertial mass. Even the size in the video seems extremely small for what is expected to be accomplished. Even by forgetting about all the required space to store what is needed to more or less autonomously operate in a 3D space, it doesn't seem possible to shoot anything in a position to pass through a skull from a so small (and instable! The fact of being flying around increases the minimal mass requirements) object even under ideal conditions. In a random situation, with that small thing flying over people and shooting from random positions, it is certainly impossible. Same thing with your proposal of injecting whatever: although almost any part of the body and minimal force seem required when talking about a deadly toxin, there are still some constraints that are very difficult or even impossible to be met under the intended conditions.
It seems evident that all the countries where black people are the majority are in Sub-Saharan Africa which, as clearly explained in my post, are way much more under-developed than other countries for the explained reasons. So, you were asking me for something that doesn't exist and, consequently, it isn't possible to deliver the example you want. I preferred to address the ignorance underlying such a request by explaining why some regions are (and have always been) poorer than others; the fact of them being mostly populated by certain race is completely irrelevant.
East Asian countries do not seem to have suffered under this colonial influence
African countries have been providing slaves since many centuries ago. These countries never had the basic resources to allow modern societies to grow until relatively recently (e.g., mining richness). People from there (= black race) have been poor and attacked by others since ever. Similar conditions don't happen anywhere else. Black people born and raised under more beneficial conditions are identical to any other race (minus the burden of systemic racism and ignorance).
unable to succeed because of a European boot on its throat?
Europe is very new. Africa has been poor since way long time before Europe existed. They don't have basic natural resources and are very far away from other human settlements. The closest examples might be pre-Columbian America (lots of natural resources + conquered relatively recently by advanced civilizations) and Australia (lots of natural resources + conquered even more recently by advanced civilizations). What you know today as western and modern-Asian societies grew during many centuries mostly thanks to being communicated. If Europe would have been an island far away from any other land like Australia, we all might still be in the middle ages.
I do respect your desire for egalitarianism. The desire to treat all races as one is noble and I appreciate your response but eventually you have to reach a point where however intelligent you might be, you are no longer able to perform any more mental contortions and are forced to look simply at the bare facts.
This isn't true for two reasons: firstly, I am not desiring to think that everyone is identical, I know it for a fact (I mean intrinsically; societies, education, personality, etc. make every individual different). I am not a hypocrite trying to show what is assumed to be better. I am not performing any mental contortion, I am explaining the actual reality of which you only want to see a small part, the one which supports your position. If I was black, my parents adopted me and I had pretty much a similar life than the one I had, I would have been a quite similar person; certainly not the same person, because ideally irrelevant but sadly very influential facts (e.g., the world being extremely racist and the fact of being adopted having some influence in your personality) would have certainly affected my personality and my growth as a person.
Africans are a rich and varied people with many beautiful qualities... the ability to build a large scale stable society doesn't seem to be one of them.
You are associating race with profound personality traits what is an extremely inaccurate assumption. Generically relating people with their country, culture, background, etc. makes some sense, but race has as much influence in personality (at least, ideally; as explained above, modern societies have provoked it to be more influential than strictly required) as any other abstract physical feature like height or weight. The reason why the fate of African countries, like Asian or European or any other group of closely-related societies, has been more or less similar is because of the aforementioned historical reasons, nothing to do with races.
Although personal information is mainly valuable as a whole rather than as individual fractions, some companies might start relying on something on this lines as a way to compensate stricter legislations on data collection (I am pretty sure that this will eventually happen).
Perhaps you would be better served by posting a series of examples of successful majority black countries.
Perhaps you should take a look at some ancient human history to understand why we evolved as we did and why the most advanced civilizations were settled in certain areas. After that, you might also want to get some information about how the richer countries treated the poorer ones for centuries by destroying their already limited resources, killing their people and performing social atrocities like slavery. You might put all that together to understand why, when things started to get fast around 200 years ago, some countries weren't even in a position to take part in that competition. After understanding all this, you might also want to know a bit more about the actual differences among races, what provokes them and what is the true impact of these and other aspects on personality, intelligence or similar. If you do all that, you might come to the surprising conclusion that we all are basically identical and that our minor differences are mostly due to random events over which we had no control and which might have easily been completely different. A king might have been a peasant if certain day certain person would have forgotten to perform certain task.
Learning from history and from our past mistakes is certainly good. Relying on centuries old fears and misinterpretations by consciously renouncing to the knowledge which is already at our disposal doesn't seem too recommendable. Mainly when we are currently living in a world of information, where everyone wants to know and to prove that their actions make sense. I personally don't see any problem with a king being a king, but only for as long as he fully appreciates his luck and understands what is the real difference between him and anyone else (= none).
Sadly, you are right. Most of nowadays privacy violations are actually voluntary (although perhaps unaware) cessions. You don't have any control on what you do on other machine like when performing virtually any action on a website. Making sure that your own system is on your side is certainly important, but it seems that the main battle is being able to somehow restrict the current wild-west like online reality. Users should knowledgeably agree (i.e., not being forced to accept a legal gibberish which nobody reads, but freely answering a clear request) before their information is collected.
The same way similar and much worse things are possible all around the world: Detroit is over 90% black.
As what usually happens with generic prejudices, your statement makes no sense. Most of black people in the USA have nothing to do with black people in any other country; most of black people in Detroit are very likely to have nothing to do with black people in other American city; and even two black persons in Detroit are extremely likely to have nothing to do with each other.
Apparently, there is a somehow homogenising black culture in the States, mostly due to their hard past common history, with which (black) people seem to agree more or less on a pretty casuistic basis (i.e., black people feeling/not themselves represented by what most of the generic ideas applicable to the US black community are). So, a slightly better version of your pretty racist and arbitrary statement would be "Detroit is over 90% people influenced by X negative outputs which are usually associated to the US black community", still quite racist and arbitrary, but at least making a tiny bit of sense. I guess that the reality is that there is a high number of low-income people who, in that specific part of the country and according to you, have a high chance of being black; this fact together with the typical US individualist/aggressive-capitalism attitudes might somehow explain a so weird situation.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, buffer overflows. Why is it possible to overflow a buffer?
This happens when the programmer has to expressly deal with all the memory management aspects (i.e., allocating enough memory before using a variable and releasing it afterwards) in languages like C. There is no real difference between this or other kind of bugs: outputs of a wrongly-built piece of software. The reason why it is much more difficult to see these errors nowadays is that more modern programming language take care of all the memory management automatically. Including this automatic memory management part consumes resources and this is one of the reasons why these language are heavier/slower than C. These more modern languages can still be misused and create buggy software, but they are usually much more programmer-friendly (what is a quite personal assessment anyway).
Given that, I have every expectation that you may not know basic meanings of the word "science". You may not have been able to realize it yet, at least you have not acknowledged it yet.
LOL. This last post has been so funny and descriptive of your behaviour (and what you represent) that I will better break my intention (one last time, hopefully) of not saying you anything else and will be much clearer than so far.
I have tried to be polite, to rely on ideas on the lines of "it isn't you, it is me", even though I am quite a quite honest and straightforward person; but this has been clearly a very bad idea. See, I have met many people like you, all of them equally wrong if not about their approach to life (who am I to arbitrarily determine how people should behave?) about what others (or at least, myself and other people similar to me) think about them and about how relevant their contribution might be. Do you want me to be completely honest regarding what I think about your whole contribution to this conversation (and probably to many other situations)? It has been 100% negative. People like you systematically invade everyone around them, self-elevate themselves to absolute authorities (despite usually having numerous lacks), reduce the value/interest of all what they touch and never accept nice and polite "warnings" or even the results themselves. You come in with whatever idea is in your mind and the blind conviction that that idea has to be imposed no matter what and nothing else is good for you. Your behaviour can provoke only two possible outputs: either hypocrisy, unfair-/arbitrary-/nepotism-, ignorance/fear-based, honest (not precisely the most common outcome) agreement or chaos. IMO, the best reaction is being extremely (even aggressively) clear when someone like you appears and this is exactly what I should have done since the very first second. Thanks for helping me remember that being generous and (kind of hypocritical) polite with people like you is a very bad idea.
Now, you can continue having this discussion with yourself. Hopefully, you will appreciate me having written so many words which you can easily take completely out of context, adapt to whatever fear/complex you might have this month and basically continue living in your in-denial world where all what matters is whatever idea happens to be in your head in that moment. In case you have any problem to easily rely on whatever abstract prejudice you might be using this time to justify your behaviour and blame me/what I represent, you should ask me for more information (gender, race, country, education, occupation, income, marital status, political views, expectations, etc.); and I will do all what I can to help you continue caring about yourself and your in-denial crusade. LOL.
Are you trying to prove me wrong in my assumption that the most likely outcome of continuing with this discussion was going nowhere? Because, pragmatically speaking, you are doing a terrible job. LOL. Seriously, I am not trying to be offensive or impolite; it seems quite clear to me the kind of conversation you are after and I am not interested in it. I think that my original point should be properly understood by anyone interested in doing so. I know that some people enjoy getting involved in long discussions about issues which are only accessorily related to accomplishing the given goal (properly understanding my point and, eventually, (dis)agreeing with it). I respect everyone's expectations and don't want to impose my approach; but also expect everyone else to respect my position. Again, I am not interested in continuing talking about irrelevant-to-me issues and that's why I will stop this chat here.
I don't agree with some of your statements, not even with the main ideas underlying your post. In general, I don't agree with virtually any absolute statement expected to be applicable to a so wide number of different people (engineers! What includes tons of different specialities, even those whose definition as engineering might be arguable, knowledge, personalities, expectations, etc.; same thing for scientists). I don't even agree with your signature promoting idealism over pragmatism (I do have default expectations like absolute fairness/honesty being the best approaches, all people being intrinsically identical, etc., but I also accept a reality proving them wrong under certain conditions)! So, I don't see the point of continuing a discussion which is very unlikely to get anywhere because of our evident differences. See? I cannot refrain myself from being pragmatic, an attitude which you don't like too much :)
And why are so many faulty pieces of software, websites even developed/used by people/companies with much more than enough resources? Incompetent, ignorant, careless, etc. attitudes systematically promoted at different levels by a system infected by arbitrariness since quite a few years ago when the big amounts of money came in and, with it, all the people only seeing software development as means (which they don't know/like) to an end (= money); a situation which, ironically, might have been tremendously beneficial if everyone had focused on what they are good at.
You can take as a reference my personal recent experiences. I am a senior programmer with a very heterogeneous background currently exclusively interested in working under high-quality/technically-demanding conditions. I am more than willing to prove my knowledge, skills, attitude at work, even by spending a relevant amount of time, but I am systematically not allowed to do so!! All what I find are random tests mostly focused on ridiculously small amounts of time (this is exactly how you can assess what a person knows! By setting up completely unrealistic conditions and forcing that person to get trained in that specific format, cheat it or prove irrelevant-for-the-job skills), abstract questions expecting very specific absolute-truth like answers (!!), looking at your public contributions in an extremely simplistic way (analysis performed mostly via counting stars, likes and emojis) or any other ridiculous resource meant to provide the fake impression that a person without knowledge can seriously assess what an expert knows. And all that without forgetting about random assumptions, prejudices and any other arbitrary output basically defining a system where the gatekeepers only let in those saying exactly what they want to hear: mantras of either very low applicability or requiring a proper analysis which never happens. Basically, unkowledgeable people deciding who are (not) knowledgeable?!
I have many other experiences on different fronts but all of them depict the same ridiculous reality: a so relevant field requiring a relevant amount of knowledge and a very specific attitude which is being managed at almost every level by people with virtually no knowledge and not even liking anything of that (thinking that the technical skills are secondary?!). Having so many problems you ask? I wonder why we are not seeing much more than that. In fact, I am pretty sure that there are lots of problems which either don't get any publicity or haven't been discovered yet. Lots of problems is the normal outcome of a highly specialised critical subfield cluelessly managed by unknowledgeable people. I am not saying that the software development industry has no place for non-technical skills, but all these people should synchronise their activity with the reality and never forget that the ultimate goal of their activity is to make sure that the technical aspects (about which they know pretty much nothing and might even not like) are being adequately managed.
A lot of it is in Spanish
Curiously, I have never got this kind of nonsensical bulk spam in Spanish despite being a Spaniard myself currently living in Spain! Other than the languages I cannot understand as what is being shown in the link above, most of the spam of this sort which I get is in English.
blasting this stuff out to harvested email addresses
Yes, I guess that this is the most logical explanation: blindly targeting random email addresses. But such a level of carelessness seems ridiculously inefficient for them, even by bearing in mind that spamming in this way is already too inefficient (who is nowadays caring about anything of what one of these emails say?). At least, they should make sure that they send their crap to people able to understand it and, ideally, interested in whatever they are offering.
Although your whole post is a bit too melodramatic, recent events seem to kind of prove that it might not be as crazy as might seem at first sight. In any case and luckily for me, I don't have any kind of reputation to damage (other than the technical/professional one which actually shouldn't be immune to my incompetence) or any ideas, actions, expectations, etc. to hide (right the contrary: lots of things to share, mainly to help certain clueless idiots understand that they should better avoid dealing with me). Actually, my behaviour has been becoming increasingly careless about all that during the last times. Anyone can find lots of stuff about me that, at first sight and for some people, might not look too good; on the other hand, I don't care about those people, their concerns and much less about their (non-existing) authority. I correct any error as soon as I realise about it. I update my behaviour/expectations as much and as regularly as possible, every time by doing what I consider best under the given conditions. Out of all the forms of stupidity, I despise fanatics the most; and out of all their possible versions, the coward, behind-the-back, in-group, getting-everything-out-of-context, always-looking-for-unfair-advantages, etc. ones. And I will always support these "individuals" to be disrespected, ridiculed and even bashed. I always expect everyone to be fully responsible for all what they do, but expect way much more of those daring to have a so pathetic attitude toward anyone (= doubt and conspire all what you want, but better be ready for the very-bad-for-your consequences if case that you were wrong).
In case of having children (I still have to find the required second half and am quite demanding; so, not too sure on this front), I will make sure that they grow knowledgeable and fearless. I will do all what is my power to help them become fully-aware persons actively contributing to make the world a better place. That world you predict isn't a world for me, for my children or for any person with a bit of self respect and knowledge. In the extremely unlikely scenario of such an eventually to ever happen, I would be joining whatever resisting movement is available (or creating my own!) and, hopefully, my kids will join me.
Nowadays and in rich countries, problems on these lines are usually accepted or, at least, tolerated by the victims; or even better: the victim already did (or probably will do) something similar. You know what they say: live by the sword, die by the sword. If you are a politician, show business celebrity or similar, perhaps you should be very careful when choosing allies/enemies and, if you have something to hide, better start thinking about how to deal with the eventual publicity. I am not part of this and will never be. I have nothing to do even with low-level hypocrites, standard conformists. I am an outsider even within the software development industry (IMO, much more concerned about non-technical aspects than it should be). Anyone wanting to prove that I am not compatible with whatever PC trend should find more than enough references after a short research (or could contact me and I would provide whatever is needed), but this is almost a badge of honour for me. I might be poor, have lots of debts, find lots of difficulties to get clients, over-work a lot and my whole activity might be systematically under-appraised, but I am very proud of what I am, think, do and every single step I have taken. There is no buts, no "will tolerate this little thing on exchange of getting whatever" to be ashamed, no even slightly dishonest or unfair actions. I have made tons of mistakes, but every time by thinking that I was doing the right thing in that moment and by trying to correct them/accept the consequences.
Some people cannot understand why I do things as I do. They cannot understand the tremendous value of always doing what you think that should do by being as fair, honest, respectful to others and, at work work, objective/professional as possible. Nothing to hide, not
Sure, in the sense that everything humans do is basically applied biology.
Evident inapplicability here aside, I like that sentence and will use applied law (stealing) to use it in the future as mine. LOL. Relevant xkcd.
You don't need to form falsifiable hypotheses and construct controlled tests to eliminate support for the hypothesis just to build a bridge, but you *do* need to be able to do the math required to ensure that the correct materials are used in the correct way.
Applying the scientific method, although a sensible proceeding in many cases, is certainly not seen as a requirement in quite a few engineering scenarios. But relying on the same methodologies than scientists do isn't the same than knowing/applying science. To build a bridge or (better and more according to my personal expertise) a machine, you have to systematically rely on physics, either the default versions or engineering ones adapted to the specific conditions. The physics knowledge of a physics-related engineer is very important and same thing for any other branch.
Being a whizz at the numbers and having a thorough materials reference does not make someone a scientist.
I haven't ever met an engineer dreaming about being called scientist or vice versa. The fact of having a relevant background on the associated scientific field doesn't mean that an engineer's work has anything to do with a scientist's one. That's why we have scientists and engineers. But your "most engineers are pretty damn useless at science", at least as per my understanding, denotes having a limited knowledge/not agreeing with whatever scientific field is applicable and this is certainly not the case. If you only meant doing scientist-kind-of work (dressing white lab coats and playing around with pipettes. LOL) then I guess that you are right and engineers are quite bad at that.
You don't need a belief in science to be a good engineer - most engineers are pretty damn useless at science.
This seems a quite inaccurate statement as far engineering is basically applied science. And similarly to what happens with most of applied branches, its whole point is to apply a theory about which you need a quite good knowledge and which you might even correct/extend via empirical validation. A different story would be talking about bastardised/extreme versions of science/engineering: getting the scientific/engineering label pretty much arbitrarily or theory-with-no-real-applicability (is this science at all?) / very-specific-implementation (is this engineering at all?).
Capturing my keypresses without my permit would be illegal almost everywhere.
The most ironic part is that you have most likely given your permission, but only in a generic or even just implicit way. Additionally, most of users aren't even completely aware about what web-based anything basically implies: browsing through files stored on a third-party computer, where every action can be easily tracked and stored. Another aspect to bear in mind is that a big proportion of modern functionalities do need to rely on visitor's information; temporary and without-allowing-access-to-anyone-else data gathering should be fine.
In summary, what is required is much more control on the visitor data non-temporary storage, sharing and usage fronts. Also clearer/express indications (and ideally the option to freely reject non-essential data collection; now, you are usually forced to accept everything in order to use whatever application) about what is happening with your data at each point like via a popup before using whatever functionality.
My current position about privacy is acceptation of the reality (everyone, everywhere dealing with my a-priori-not-too-relevant data without my express consent) + neither liking nor really minding it. The key issue allowing me to think in that way is knowing what is being mostly done with that data now and in the near future: not too much.
Most of big-data efforts have been focusing on gathering and managing, but not on properly understanding; that's why and despite its huge potential value, most of this information isn't being properly maximised. In any case, I certainly don't support any kind of against-intention-of-user actions, I have never developed or used anything on so invasive lines and look forward to legislations to keeping up with all what is happening on the online/software privacy front.
I haven't been getting too much spam since quite long time ago. But the one I get is very weird like the one which I received right now (Slashdot doesn't support those characters).
I have been getting an email similar to that one about 2-5 times per week for over the last quite a few months. They are always written in a language I cannot understand (sorry about that, obsessive spammers, but I can only understand Spanish, English and bit of German) and usually include the word SPAM in the title!! I have never replied to any of them, visited anything referred by them or even made the tiniest effort to translate what they say.
existing software project doing data processing using explicit programming logic, and the team charged with maintaining it find they can replace it with a deep-learning-based solution
So, that team relied on a pre-made code to deal with a specific part of the implementation! Why is this news? Although I personally prefer to develop most of the (data-management) algorithms myself, relying on third-party dependencies is a quite common and acceptable proceeding in software development.
Also note that I am a man (and have been like this since I was born), wear glasses, my hair is blond(-ish) and my height/weight is around 185 cm/75 kg. Anyone interested in knowing more about these or any other of my generic features (completely irrelevant for the points I made in the comments above and for my online activity as a whole, eminently focused on my work as a programmer/engineer) should better try to avoid dealing with me. Someone might think that the fact of having replaced all my pictures with a logo is already quite indicative of what I think on this front, but that person would be wrong: as internet has taught me, nothing is evident/easy enough for some people.
Errata Security confirmed that they will not be changing their name to Much More Than Just Errata Security. LOL.
Just in case that point isn't clear and someone considers it relevant here, note that I am white. At least, I look white like all my family does, although we Spaniards are quite mixed people because Spain has been invaded by virtually everyone feeling like invading something. LOL. In any case, I guess that this is also true for many people almost everywhere, what kind of seem to weaken even further abstract race-based claims.
you make a bunch of assertions without proof or reasons.
There is no available data to perform the corresponding calculations, but I think that my statements can be intuitively confirmed. Just take any gun as a reference to understand the minimum size/weight requirements, notably higher than what is being displayed in the video. Without forgetting that you need all the 3D movement operating electronics. I am intentionally ignoring the AI part because, at this point, creating a bot able to move more or less autonomously as shown in the video is simply impossible.
Grape sized drones exist, that's why I specified the size
I don't doubt that. But they certainly cannot shoot bullets which might go through a skull.
Neurotoxin that are lethal in microgram quantities exist
My comment was focused on the physical requirements of a flying object to shoot/inject something anywhere: relevant force/pressure (momentum) which cannot be generated unless reacting against something (= opposing weight/mass). Coming up with some kind of suicide bot might be relatively easily (making sure that it hits the target might be quite difficult though), but a reusable one is a completely different story. Think about what a mosquito does: even by ignoring the difficulty associated with landing in a random location, you need to exert a relevant pressure. Emulating the required actions/muscles at such a micro-scale seems really difficult.
Having a swarm of these attacking a crowd is just an engineering challenge of moderate difficulty.
Bots of that small size and being reusable is, as explained, either extremely difficult or practically impossible. It would be much easier to create much bigger ones shooting whatever projectiles.
The size is a very relevant aspect. Firstly, you need some space to store all the required electronics. Secondly, you cannot generate enough force without reaction/inertial mass. Even the size in the video seems extremely small for what is expected to be accomplished. Even by forgetting about all the required space to store what is needed to more or less autonomously operate in a 3D space, it doesn't seem possible to shoot anything in a position to pass through a skull from a so small (and instable! The fact of being flying around increases the minimal mass requirements) object even under ideal conditions. In a random situation, with that small thing flying over people and shooting from random positions, it is certainly impossible. Same thing with your proposal of injecting whatever: although almost any part of the body and minimal force seem required when talking about a deadly toxin, there are still some constraints that are very difficult or even impossible to be met under the intended conditions.
So no examples then.
It seems evident that all the countries where black people are the majority are in Sub-Saharan Africa which, as clearly explained in my post, are way much more under-developed than other countries for the explained reasons. So, you were asking me for something that doesn't exist and, consequently, it isn't possible to deliver the example you want. I preferred to address the ignorance underlying such a request by explaining why some regions are (and have always been) poorer than others; the fact of them being mostly populated by certain race is completely irrelevant.
East Asian countries do not seem to have suffered under this colonial influence
African countries have been providing slaves since many centuries ago. These countries never had the basic resources to allow modern societies to grow until relatively recently (e.g., mining richness). People from there (= black race) have been poor and attacked by others since ever. Similar conditions don't happen anywhere else. Black people born and raised under more beneficial conditions are identical to any other race (minus the burden of systemic racism and ignorance).
unable to succeed because of a European boot on its throat?
Europe is very new. Africa has been poor since way long time before Europe existed. They don't have basic natural resources and are very far away from other human settlements. The closest examples might be pre-Columbian America (lots of natural resources + conquered relatively recently by advanced civilizations) and Australia (lots of natural resources + conquered even more recently by advanced civilizations). What you know today as western and modern-Asian societies grew during many centuries mostly thanks to being communicated. If Europe would have been an island far away from any other land like Australia, we all might still be in the middle ages.
I do respect your desire for egalitarianism. The desire to treat all races as one is noble and I appreciate your response but eventually you have to reach a point where however intelligent you might be, you are no longer able to perform any more mental contortions and are forced to look simply at the bare facts.
This isn't true for two reasons: firstly, I am not desiring to think that everyone is identical, I know it for a fact (I mean intrinsically; societies, education, personality, etc. make every individual different). I am not a hypocrite trying to show what is assumed to be better. I am not performing any mental contortion, I am explaining the actual reality of which you only want to see a small part, the one which supports your position. If I was black, my parents adopted me and I had pretty much a similar life than the one I had, I would have been a quite similar person; certainly not the same person, because ideally irrelevant but sadly very influential facts (e.g., the world being extremely racist and the fact of being adopted having some influence in your personality) would have certainly affected my personality and my growth as a person.
Africans are a rich and varied people with many beautiful qualities... the ability to build a large scale stable society doesn't seem to be one of them.
You are associating race with profound personality traits what is an extremely inaccurate assumption. Generically relating people with their country, culture, background, etc. makes some sense, but race has as much influence in personality (at least, ideally; as explained above, modern societies have provoked it to be more influential than strictly required) as any other abstract physical feature like height or weight. The reason why the fate of African countries, like Asian or European or any other group of closely-related societies, has been more or less similar is because of the aforementioned historical reasons, nothing to do with races.
Although personal information is mainly valuable as a whole rather than as individual fractions, some companies might start relying on something on this lines as a way to compensate stricter legislations on data collection (I am pretty sure that this will eventually happen).
Perhaps you would be better served by posting a series of examples of successful majority black countries.
Perhaps you should take a look at some ancient human history to understand why we evolved as we did and why the most advanced civilizations were settled in certain areas. After that, you might also want to get some information about how the richer countries treated the poorer ones for centuries by destroying their already limited resources, killing their people and performing social atrocities like slavery. You might put all that together to understand why, when things started to get fast around 200 years ago, some countries weren't even in a position to take part in that competition. After understanding all this, you might also want to know a bit more about the actual differences among races, what provokes them and what is the true impact of these and other aspects on personality, intelligence or similar. If you do all that, you might come to the surprising conclusion that we all are basically identical and that our minor differences are mostly due to random events over which we had no control and which might have easily been completely different. A king might have been a peasant if certain day certain person would have forgotten to perform certain task.
Learning from history and from our past mistakes is certainly good. Relying on centuries old fears and misinterpretations by consciously renouncing to the knowledge which is already at our disposal doesn't seem too recommendable. Mainly when we are currently living in a world of information, where everyone wants to know and to prove that their actions make sense. I personally don't see any problem with a king being a king, but only for as long as he fully appreciates his luck and understands what is the real difference between him and anyone else (= none).
Just make the data collection illegal outright.
This will never happen. Personal information is way too valuable and lots of users don't mind to give away some of their privacy to get free stuff.
Sadly, you are right. Most of nowadays privacy violations are actually voluntary (although perhaps unaware) cessions. You don't have any control on what you do on other machine like when performing virtually any action on a website. Making sure that your own system is on your side is certainly important, but it seems that the main battle is being able to somehow restrict the current wild-west like online reality. Users should knowledgeably agree (i.e., not being forced to accept a legal gibberish which nobody reads, but freely answering a clear request) before their information is collected.
The same way similar and much worse things are possible all around the world: Detroit is over 90% black.
As what usually happens with generic prejudices, your statement makes no sense. Most of black people in the USA have nothing to do with black people in any other country; most of black people in Detroit are very likely to have nothing to do with black people in other American city; and even two black persons in Detroit are extremely likely to have nothing to do with each other.
Apparently, there is a somehow homogenising black culture in the States, mostly due to their hard past common history, with which (black) people seem to agree more or less on a pretty casuistic basis (i.e., black people feeling/not themselves represented by what most of the generic ideas applicable to the US black community are). So, a slightly better version of your pretty racist and arbitrary statement would be "Detroit is over 90% people influenced by X negative outputs which are usually associated to the US black community", still quite racist and arbitrary, but at least making a tiny bit of sense. I guess that the reality is that there is a high number of low-income people who, in that specific part of the country and according to you, have a high chance of being black; this fact together with the typical US individualist/aggressive-capitalism attitudes might somehow explain a so weird situation.