Here again, the Scandinavians prove they are the most superior culture on the planet
As a Dane, I can confirm this in full; also, we are tall, blond, honest and noble.
However, we are not the only ones to have a seed bank - Wikipedia lists 5 major facilities: The millennium Seed Bank in UK, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Australian PlantBank, the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry and National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in the US, as well as several smaller ones in India.
Your post is pretty ignorant and short sighted, based on a very narrow perception of the world you have. People like you really should refrain from having discussions about the metaphysical in AI when you clearly don't understand how humans have evolved in that respect, even over the past couple thousand years.
You shouldn't be quite so keen on putting down other commenters in this way - your own comments are not deeply insightful either, even you appear to think so yourself. All you achieve is to alienate the person you are talking to, as well as others who will see you as immature and lacking in self-confidence. And you don't actually need to try to put other people down - just keep to known facts, argue logically and accept that if you are wrong, you stand to gain new insight, so it is hardly a 'defeat'.
Plus, of course, where do you see that the GP 'clearly doesn't understand how humans have evolved'? To me this sounds like the kind of arguments I used to get into as a teenager who had just realised he knew it all - no more than agressive bluster, really. You'd do better by seeing the GP for what it most likely is: humour. Otherwise you'll end up sounding like a politician.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history. You do not know even how long you've existed. You believe you've existed your entire life, but your existence from your perspective is nothing more than a collection of memories that may or may not be real, you have absolutely no way to confirm or deny that, you can only assume that its true and move forward because assuming anything else is just a waste of time.
You are making some bold assumptions here; these are issues that have been discussed very throughly for centuries; summed up rather eloquently by Descartes: 'Cogito ergo sum'. The scientific method springs from the need to address the uncertainties of cognition being subjective - it is the best way we have been able to think of, which will over time help our knowledge progress towards objectivity, if applied scrupulously.
So, you assume that all intelligence must by necessity be like human intelligence; IOW, you haven't been able to imagine any other form of intelligence. I suppose most people have difficulty doing that - myself included - but that is no reason to assume that none exists. Apart from the fact that we don't really know what constitutes 'intelligence' and whether that has any bearing on things like consciousness and self-awareness, there are actually people to who not knowing everything objectively is not a burden, and to whom the idea of absolute certainty is seen as a threat; they are called scientists.
Another place where robots might be a good replacement is at the middle management level - one of the big problem with managers is that they so often combine lack of people skills with absence of useful knowledge and inability to empathise, and introducing robots could improve on all three fronts. It certainly couldn't get worse.
Hmm? Did you in fact read Das Kapital? Marx was first and foremost a theoretical economist and his economic theory is intended to be a scientific work, in as far as one can call economic theory science (not meant to be a slight on economists, by the way; after all, Mathematics is not universally considered a science either, because it isn't empirical).
Hence it follows that capitalism is, as you say, 'evil'.
I'm not sure that conclusion is valid; what you are doing is painting it as a black/white issue. In the real world there will by necessity always be some degree of inequality, but society will not really be stable unless inequality is kept in check - hence, the mechanisms that make up capitalism have to be kept in check to some extent. I think it is plain, common sense.
In the context of the article, this analysis is spot-on.
If you say so - I wasn't commenting on the article.
I'm not sure he will be laughing - he never said that Capilism was all-out evil, only that it will by necessity come to an end, because it causes growing instability. In his opinion it was inevitable that the gap between rich and poor will grow under capitalism, and that this will lead to violent revolutions, but now a days this scenario has got competition from things like resource shortages and the fact that we will eventually reach some physical limit on this planet. As he pointed out, a sustainable society is one where we move beyond the dogma of capitalism and address the limitations in that system. It may well end up looking like a form of communism.
Not really - Oracle who owns Java, are investing massively in Java tools. In fact, I would say that Java is finally beginning to take off as the mainstream programming language, because the hardware is finally cheap and powerful enough. Just to illustrate how seriously the big players take Java, consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article about IBM System Z:
Support for zAAP processors. These specialty processors allow IBM JVM processing cycles to be executed on the configured zAAPs with no anticipated modifications to the Java application(s). This means that deployment and integration of new Java technology-based workloads can happen on the very same platform as heritage applications and core business databases in a highly cost-effective manner
Yes, mainframes have specialized Java processors as one of their many options. Believe me, they don't do this for fun. Another things is, Java on the web is no longer about applets; see J2EE - this is about Java application servers, and the number of standards alone that sorround Java is an indication that this is a massive industry. It isn't about to go away, on the contrary.
Yet another variations on 'As I Walked Amongst The Fluff of my Navel One Sunny Spring Morning'? Somehow, people who are succesful in business always want to leave a legacy, but unfortunately, all they seem to able to manage is this kind of vanity publications. Most of them seem to tell us that "I struggled in the beginning, but then I got lucky and now I feel I'm better than other people." The difference between the "successful business leader" is not that they somehow possess better abilities; they just got lucky, and they somehow feel entitled to profit. We never hear about the millions of similar, mediocre people who never made it; if we did, we would see the obvious similarities.
Bones provide much more than structure. They are awesome!:D
My dog would definitely agree with you on that.
However, although the technique is still in its infancy, it does seem very promising; there is already work being done on using 3D printing to produce functioning organs like kidneys and lungs, using living cells instead of plastics. It does not seem unreasonable at all to extrapolate this to include an ever widening range of organs over time - the hardest part will be nerve cells, I expect, not least because the cells can be so incredibly long. I think we may see the first, simple replacement organs in the next decade or so; you could even say we're already seeing the first examples: skin grafts made from a combination of artificial material and the patient's own cells: http://www.technologyreview.co...
It's always sad when these things happen. Personally, I'm not fanatical about this issue, but I hate it when I am dictated what to do and think, and how to work - this was my main reason for getting off Windows ASAP, and then later GNOME.
What makes it so sad is that it used to be fun - I loved playing around with DOS and later Windows, and even enjoyed programming for Windows 3, but I stopped enjoying what I was doing when they got imperialistic. The same thing with GNOME - when they started on 'simplifying' things on the desktop by taking away options and dumbing down the interface (a better way would have been to allow a form of expert mode - those of us with that ambition would be happy with vi and a config file).
And now this? I honestly don't mind, unless it forces me to use other things that I don't want, or gets in the way of what I do for a living. One of the things that annoy me at the moment is the drive towards turning Debian into a laptop/tablet OS, with lots of automatic crap going on as you log on to the desktop: network manager and the whole 'semantic desktop' or whatever it is called. It may make sense if you live your whole life on a portable device with wifi and USB, but I work on servers and I want my desktop PC to be a server with a desktop for convenience; I have no liking for tablety fashion statements.
Ironically, I chose Debian because it tends to be conservative, focused on SW freedom, but it worries me that they've recently looked like they're getting into bed with the GNOME crowd and now also systemd, if I understand things correctly. The fun - not to mention my ability to be productive - is under pressure.
Good joke, of course, but it is worth mentioning that there are legal requirements to electrical engineers in most countries, just like for gas engineers, building engineers, etc - not to mention things like lawyers and medical doctors. This is in contrast with software engineers, for whom there are no formal, legal requirements at all - the difference between the two is of course that a SW engineer's shoddy work can't cause building to explode, burn or collapse, although admittedly there are things out there that can severaly taint your soul.
I think the SW industry's focus on certified skills is at best half-hearted in that most companies don't really care all that much, and with good reason. Some of these certifications are at best a competence in using very specific toolsets - like eg MSCE - whereas others are too wide-ranging; a degree in computer science doesn't actually guarantee that the person is any good in a practical job, and it may sometimes be a hindrance, if it turns out that the need to understand everything in depth gets in the way of actually doing things.
...hammers don't need any training or lengthy experience to develop decent skills to use.
Oh, but that's such an easy mistake to make; have a look at just how many kinds of hammers there are and think again. Yes, anybody can take a cheap hammer and knock in nail, although even that is not as simple to do well. To the untrained eye a hammer is just a lump of iron on a stick, perhaps, but using a simple tool requires much more skill than using a complicated, automatic gadget. Which is why amateur DIYers go and buy electric tools, where the professional will often buy simple, yet surprisingly expensive manual tools.
Despite having written programs for, quite literally, decades, I have yet to produce an app; I can't see the point, really. We already enough of that kind of crap lying around, and we clearly don't need people whose only skill is being able to produce programs. There is far more need for people with skills in bio-medical sciences and -engineering, which is where things are developing at a truly staggering rate.
When business people start talking about how much we need more coding skills, what they really mean is that they want it to be even cheaper, so they can make a larger profit in what is already a slightly stagnant market. Face up to reality - all the great inventions in computing have already been made something like 20 years ago: relational databases, internet, etc. Things like Facebook and Twitter are not innovations, they are just village gossip by other means.
static int do_some_work (context_t context,
int x,
error_t **error) {
int rv = 0;
database_t *db;
data_t v;
db = get_db (context, error);
do some work...
if (v = compute_v (context, db, error)){
more work...
}
else
return rv; }
To my eyes, the block structure makes it easier to see what goes on, and the goto is not used. In your example, the goto blends into the surrounding code, making it easy to overlook. Also, I think most people expect the TRUE outcome to be the one actioned upon, which is in fact what your example does as well.
It sounds to me like you have a very remarkable child, whether autistic or not.
I'm not convinced that therapies designed for deeply autistic children are well suited in this case; without knowing too much about the subject, the autism spectrum is very wide ranging, and based mostly on symptoms, and it doesn't seem to be a one-dimensional scale either. I suspect - and this is based purely on extrapolation from my own experiences - that he will most likely benefit from learning about social skills in terms of 'technological understanding these skills, if that makes sense. It is of course very easy for an outsider to make wise about somebody else's problems, so please forgive me if I'm talking complete nonsense - but my guess is that he simply does not feel a strong need for social contact, nor does he have a strong intuition about these things, but because he is very strong in areas that require logical understanding, he will be able to appreciate the logic behind social and moral ideas, and he should be able to accept them in a positive way.
Other people with a similar personality often seem to say things like "Numbers are my friends" etc. If you start from his strong side, you should be able to help him grow towards the things he finds difficult, like social skills, expressing emotions etc. And remember, he is different; what makes you happy is not necessarily what makes him happy. As a parent, your goal should be to equip him for life on his terms, which may be radically different from what you would have chosen.
When did science become the deity of a religion where its name can be taken in vain and it has agency that men are to respect?
The phrase 'taking [...]'s name in vain" is a useful way to emphasize that you think somebody is misusing a reference to something. I didn't really need to tell you that, did I? Religion is full of colourful language that most people know, and I don't have a grudge against religion as such, only against those that insist on tweaking the thruth to avoid facing up to reality. And unlike religion, science earns the respect that people show it; science doesn't need to demand respect.
One can't help, but wonder, what other famously "settled" science will come apart?
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge. This is what always happens; people don't understand how science works or how scientists think and communicate. When the scientist says 'To the best of current knowledge, eating eggs is probably bad for you, although we really haven't researched that enough' it translates into 'Science says egg is bad for you'.
I would have hoped we, as engineers, or at least as individuals interested in science, would have a clearer understanding of this - it lies at the very heart of science. Unlike religion, science is not about absolute truth - it is all about improving accuracy by means of the scientific method. If you want certainty, go to your church/synagogue/mosque/temple/... - if you want something that is likely to work, go to science.
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Or perhaps not - poor they may be, but idiots? Take a critical look at what we, in the capitalistic part of the world have to offer; is it really all that great? Yeah, the prospect of getting rich seems attractive, but the abysmal inequality, the broken promises of the not-really-democracy, the hollowness of the freedoms etc - I think people in Cuba can see those problems clearly, and I'm not convinced they will want all of that.
Another thing is the question of who is going to eat who - just look at China and India. Both are developing nations, with well educated populations, and both are exploding onto the stage. Perhaps Cuba will do the same, to a lesser degree, so who is going to be eaten? The US, in particular, tends to believe that everybody else will bow to their power; but we should remember that the US also exploded onto the scene in similar circumstances only about a century ago, when they were in essence a developing nation. Back then, American culture became the hottest thing - maybe now we are going to see Chinese, Indian, Cuban etc as the hottest, new thing around?
One of the many, big, unanswered questions concerning the origin of the universe is - where did the energy come from? Conservation of energy - the assumption that energy cannot be either destroyed or created - is a fundamental axiom in physics, which goes against the idea that there was a point in time before which the universe didn't exist, but after, it did. Unless, of course, one can conceive of a negative energy of equal size having been created at that same moment.
A naive consideration would say that if a mass, M, is created, then there must have an 'anti-mass', -M, as well; using Newton's equations, we would expect M and -M to repulse each other, while M would attract M and -M would attract -M (yes, doesn't make sense at stated, but follow my thought here, OK?) And, if one were to ramble on along those lines anyway, it seems tempting to look at the equations for how electric charges interact and think of electric charge as a kind of imaginary (as in complex numbers) mass. No doubt better people than I have already spotted this and worked out why it doesn't make sense, but I haven't seen their work yet.
What the actual fuck? You pull numbers from nowhere saying a kg of 'top notch' hash should cost a dollar?
Yes, I didn't quite believe it either, years ago, but then I tried to actually grow cannabis myself "at an undisclosed location". I bought something like 10 - 20 seeds online for what would be about $20, all of which grew into large, nay huge, plants, about 3.5 meters tall. I never weighed them, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that there were more than 20 kg of smokeable pot there, very potent too. So, not hash, but not far from $1 per kg of what I would have called top notch, had I been able to pronouce that at the time. In the end I threw most of it out, as it was taking over too much of my life.
So, if we factor in the way hash is produced and where (in the Middle East, mostly), perhaps the real number should be around $5 per kg; produced industrially and legally in Europe or America, I'm sure we could get the price down to that level or lower. Whatever - the point here is that there is an absolutely astonishingly obscene markup on illegal drugs. Money that not only bleeds the consumer, but also doesn't produce any tax revenue; and on top of that, much of it goes directly into financing terrorism, if one is to believe official sources (it certainly sounds plausible enough).
As far as micromanufacture goes, I work in the field.
What? You actually know what you're talking about, as opposed to somebody that I'm too modest to mention:-)
About telecommuting - don't you think we might go back to modus operandi somewhat similar to what we had centureis ago, where things like big workplaces like we know today didn't really exist, but where skilled crafts-men would ply their trade to a number of customers where needed? A sort of extended telecommuting, if you will.
As for decentralised production, maybe large volumes would be less needed? I mean, if we live in a small community of 1000 people, how many new cars would have to be produced to satisfy the needs of that community? I may only be speculating wildly, but I think it likely that if major parts of our large-scale infrastructure disappears, this will be accompanied by a cultural change away from comsumerism, and society will no longer produce and throw away at the same, staggering pace. I mean, take a car, or a mobile - how much of the need to buy a new one and throw away the old one is simply the result of unwillingness on the side of the manufaturer to make their products upgradeable? Wouldn't it be perfectly doable to design a line of cars or mobile phones that could be upgraded in small steps? I think so - it ought to be possible to make a car that could be modified in small steps all the way from a cheap, basic model with a.7 liter engine all the way to a huge, roaring super off-roader with 8-wheel drive and built-in swimming pool; you might have to change every compnent on the way, but it should be possible to so in small, very affordable steps.
no, your government bans drugs because it's a useful way of suppressing blacks, mexicans, chinese, hippies, dissidents and other undesirables.
Really? Well, perhaps that is an aspect of it, but I can think of several other factors:
- Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'. Insight and understanding don't enter into the picture, because most people's opinions are based on hearsay rather than knowledge - they have been taught not to trust their own ability to understand things, so they don't want to even try.
- Drug barons are rich and well connected to the establishment, just like others in the top of international crime. Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business, which depends on drugs being illegal and therefore very expensive. I mean, fairly priced a kg of top notch hash should cost something like 1 USD (citation: thin air, I'm just guessing), so even with the usual, over the top taxation, a gram would be astonnishingly cheap, and the drugs cartels wouldn't have any business.
Your lack of cynicism is verging on being a ringing endorsement for the current drugs laws.
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Well, to a creationist, the fact that there are no intermediaries between you and your parents is proof that you are not related.
Deepwater Wind, eh?
Something like this: http://graphicleftovers.com/gr...
Here again, the Scandinavians prove they are the most superior culture on the planet
As a Dane, I can confirm this in full; also, we are tall, blond, honest and noble.
However, we are not the only ones to have a seed bank - Wikipedia lists 5 major facilities: The millennium Seed Bank in UK, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Australian PlantBank, the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry and National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in the US, as well as several smaller ones in India.
To take the last part first:
Your post is pretty ignorant and short sighted, based on a very narrow perception of the world you have. People like you really should refrain from having discussions about the metaphysical in AI when you clearly don't understand how humans have evolved in that respect, even over the past couple thousand years.
You shouldn't be quite so keen on putting down other commenters in this way - your own comments are not deeply insightful either, even you appear to think so yourself. All you achieve is to alienate the person you are talking to, as well as others who will see you as immature and lacking in self-confidence. And you don't actually need to try to put other people down - just keep to known facts, argue logically and accept that if you are wrong, you stand to gain new insight, so it is hardly a 'defeat'.
Plus, of course, where do you see that the GP 'clearly doesn't understand how humans have evolved'? To me this sounds like the kind of arguments I used to get into as a teenager who had just realised he knew it all - no more than agressive bluster, really. You'd do better by seeing the GP for what it most likely is: humour. Otherwise you'll end up sounding like a politician.
No, they won't. They will believe based on observations and known history. You do not know even how long you've existed. You believe you've existed your entire life, but your existence from your perspective is nothing more than a collection of memories that may or may not be real, you have absolutely no way to confirm or deny that, you can only assume that its true and move forward because assuming anything else is just a waste of time.
You are making some bold assumptions here; these are issues that have been discussed very throughly for centuries; summed up rather eloquently by Descartes: 'Cogito ergo sum'. The scientific method springs from the need to address the uncertainties of cognition being subjective - it is the best way we have been able to think of, which will over time help our knowledge progress towards objectivity, if applied scrupulously.
So, you assume that all intelligence must by necessity be like human intelligence; IOW, you haven't been able to imagine any other form of intelligence. I suppose most people have difficulty doing that - myself included - but that is no reason to assume that none exists. Apart from the fact that we don't really know what constitutes 'intelligence' and whether that has any bearing on things like consciousness and self-awareness, there are actually people to who not knowing everything objectively is not a burden, and to whom the idea of absolute certainty is seen as a threat; they are called scientists.
Yeah, I don't like change either. I prefer larger notes.
Another place where robots might be a good replacement is at the middle management level - one of the big problem with managers is that they so often combine lack of people skills with absence of useful knowledge and inability to empathise, and introducing robots could improve on all three fronts. It certainly couldn't get worse.
Hmm? Did you in fact read Das Kapital? Marx was first and foremost a theoretical economist and his economic theory is intended to be a scientific work, in as far as one can call economic theory science (not meant to be a slight on economists, by the way; after all, Mathematics is not universally considered a science either, because it isn't empirical).
Hence it follows that capitalism is, as you say, 'evil'.
I'm not sure that conclusion is valid; what you are doing is painting it as a black/white issue. In the real world there will by necessity always be some degree of inequality, but society will not really be stable unless inequality is kept in check - hence, the mechanisms that make up capitalism have to be kept in check to some extent. I think it is plain, common sense.
In the context of the article, this analysis is spot-on.
If you say so - I wasn't commenting on the article.
I'm not sure he will be laughing - he never said that Capilism was all-out evil, only that it will by necessity come to an end, because it causes growing instability. In his opinion it was inevitable that the gap between rich and poor will grow under capitalism, and that this will lead to violent revolutions, but now a days this scenario has got competition from things like resource shortages and the fact that we will eventually reach some physical limit on this planet. As he pointed out, a sustainable society is one where we move beyond the dogma of capitalism and address the limitations in that system. It may well end up looking like a form of communism.
...java on the web is kind of dwindling ...
Not really - Oracle who owns Java, are investing massively in Java tools. In fact, I would say that Java is finally beginning to take off as the mainstream programming language, because the hardware is finally cheap and powerful enough. Just to illustrate how seriously the big players take Java, consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article about IBM System Z:
Support for zAAP processors. These specialty processors allow IBM JVM processing cycles to be executed on the configured zAAPs with no anticipated modifications to the Java application(s). This means that deployment and integration of new Java technology-based workloads can happen on the very same platform as heritage applications and core business databases in a highly cost-effective manner
Yes, mainframes have specialized Java processors as one of their many options. Believe me, they don't do this for fun. Another things is, Java on the web is no longer about applets; see J2EE - this is about Java application servers, and the number of standards alone that sorround Java is an indication that this is a massive industry. It isn't about to go away, on the contrary.
Yet another variations on 'As I Walked Amongst The Fluff of my Navel One Sunny Spring Morning'? Somehow, people who are succesful in business always want to leave a legacy, but unfortunately, all they seem to able to manage is this kind of vanity publications. Most of them seem to tell us that "I struggled in the beginning, but then I got lucky and now I feel I'm better than other people." The difference between the "successful business leader" is not that they somehow possess better abilities; they just got lucky, and they somehow feel entitled to profit. We never hear about the millions of similar, mediocre people who never made it; if we did, we would see the obvious similarities.
Bones provide much more than structure. They are awesome! :D
My dog would definitely agree with you on that.
However, although the technique is still in its infancy, it does seem very promising; there is already work being done on using 3D printing to produce functioning organs like kidneys and lungs, using living cells instead of plastics. It does not seem unreasonable at all to extrapolate this to include an ever widening range of organs over time - the hardest part will be nerve cells, I expect, not least because the cells can be so incredibly long. I think we may see the first, simple replacement organs in the next decade or so; you could even say we're already seeing the first examples: skin grafts made from a combination of artificial material and the patient's own cells: http://www.technologyreview.co...
It's always sad when these things happen. Personally, I'm not fanatical about this issue, but I hate it when I am dictated what to do and think, and how to work - this was my main reason for getting off Windows ASAP, and then later GNOME.
What makes it so sad is that it used to be fun - I loved playing around with DOS and later Windows, and even enjoyed programming for Windows 3, but I stopped enjoying what I was doing when they got imperialistic. The same thing with GNOME - when they started on 'simplifying' things on the desktop by taking away options and dumbing down the interface (a better way would have been to allow a form of expert mode - those of us with that ambition would be happy with vi and a config file).
And now this? I honestly don't mind, unless it forces me to use other things that I don't want, or gets in the way of what I do for a living. One of the things that annoy me at the moment is the drive towards turning Debian into a laptop/tablet OS, with lots of automatic crap going on as you log on to the desktop: network manager and the whole 'semantic desktop' or whatever it is called. It may make sense if you live your whole life on a portable device with wifi and USB, but I work on servers and I want my desktop PC to be a server with a desktop for convenience; I have no liking for tablety fashion statements.
Ironically, I chose Debian because it tends to be conservative, focused on SW freedom, but it worries me that they've recently looked like they're getting into bed with the GNOME crowd and now also systemd, if I understand things correctly. The fun - not to mention my ability to be productive - is under pressure.
Good joke, of course, but it is worth mentioning that there are legal requirements to electrical engineers in most countries, just like for gas engineers, building engineers, etc - not to mention things like lawyers and medical doctors. This is in contrast with software engineers, for whom there are no formal, legal requirements at all - the difference between the two is of course that a SW engineer's shoddy work can't cause building to explode, burn or collapse, although admittedly there are things out there that can severaly taint your soul.
I think the SW industry's focus on certified skills is at best half-hearted in that most companies don't really care all that much, and with good reason. Some of these certifications are at best a competence in using very specific toolsets - like eg MSCE - whereas others are too wide-ranging; a degree in computer science doesn't actually guarantee that the person is any good in a practical job, and it may sometimes be a hindrance, if it turns out that the need to understand everything in depth gets in the way of actually doing things.
...hammers don't need any training or lengthy experience to develop decent skills to use.
Oh, but that's such an easy mistake to make; have a look at just how many kinds of hammers there are and think again. Yes, anybody can take a cheap hammer and knock in nail, although even that is not as simple to do well. To the untrained eye a hammer is just a lump of iron on a stick, perhaps, but using a simple tool requires much more skill than using a complicated, automatic gadget. Which is why amateur DIYers go and buy electric tools, where the professional will often buy simple, yet surprisingly expensive manual tools.
...everyone today needs to be an app developer...
Despite having written programs for, quite literally, decades, I have yet to produce an app; I can't see the point, really. We already enough of that kind of crap lying around, and we clearly don't need people whose only skill is being able to produce programs. There is far more need for people with skills in bio-medical sciences and -engineering, which is where things are developing at a truly staggering rate.
When business people start talking about how much we need more coding skills, what they really mean is that they want it to be even cheaper, so they can make a larger profit in what is already a slightly stagnant market. Face up to reality - all the great inventions in computing have already been made something like 20 years ago: relational databases, internet, etc. Things like Facebook and Twitter are not innovations, they are just village gossip by other means.
How about:
To my eyes, the block structure makes it easier to see what goes on, and the goto is not used. In your example, the goto blends into the surrounding code, making it easy to overlook. Also, I think most people expect the TRUE outcome to be the one actioned upon, which is in fact what your example does as well.
It sounds to me like you have a very remarkable child, whether autistic or not.
I'm not convinced that therapies designed for deeply autistic children are well suited in this case; without knowing too much about the subject, the autism spectrum is very wide ranging, and based mostly on symptoms, and it doesn't seem to be a one-dimensional scale either. I suspect - and this is based purely on extrapolation from my own experiences - that he will most likely benefit from learning about social skills in terms of 'technological understanding these skills, if that makes sense. It is of course very easy for an outsider to make wise about somebody else's problems, so please forgive me if I'm talking complete nonsense - but my guess is that he simply does not feel a strong need for social contact, nor does he have a strong intuition about these things, but because he is very strong in areas that require logical understanding, he will be able to appreciate the logic behind social and moral ideas, and he should be able to accept them in a positive way.
Other people with a similar personality often seem to say things like "Numbers are my friends" etc. If you start from his strong side, you should be able to help him grow towards the things he finds difficult, like social skills, expressing emotions etc. And remember, he is different; what makes you happy is not necessarily what makes him happy. As a parent, your goal should be to equip him for life on his terms, which may be radically different from what you would have chosen.
When did science become the deity of a religion where its name can be taken in vain and it has agency that men are to respect?
The phrase 'taking [...]'s name in vain" is a useful way to emphasize that you think somebody is misusing a reference to something. I didn't really need to tell you that, did I? Religion is full of colourful language that most people know, and I don't have a grudge against religion as such, only against those that insist on tweaking the thruth to avoid facing up to reality. And unlike religion, science earns the respect that people show it; science doesn't need to demand respect.
One can't help, but wonder, what other famously "settled" science will come apart?
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge. This is what always happens; people don't understand how science works or how scientists think and communicate. When the scientist says 'To the best of current knowledge, eating eggs is probably bad for you, although we really haven't researched that enough' it translates into 'Science says egg is bad for you'.
I would have hoped we, as engineers, or at least as individuals interested in science, would have a clearer understanding of this - it lies at the very heart of science. Unlike religion, science is not about absolute truth - it is all about improving accuracy by means of the scientific method. If you want certainty, go to your church/synagogue/mosque/temple/... - if you want something that is likely to work, go to science.
Slahdotted, were you?
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Or perhaps not - poor they may be, but idiots? Take a critical look at what we, in the capitalistic part of the world have to offer; is it really all that great? Yeah, the prospect of getting rich seems attractive, but the abysmal inequality, the broken promises of the not-really-democracy, the hollowness of the freedoms etc - I think people in Cuba can see those problems clearly, and I'm not convinced they will want all of that.
Another thing is the question of who is going to eat who - just look at China and India. Both are developing nations, with well educated populations, and both are exploding onto the stage. Perhaps Cuba will do the same, to a lesser degree, so who is going to be eaten? The US, in particular, tends to believe that everybody else will bow to their power; but we should remember that the US also exploded onto the scene in similar circumstances only about a century ago, when they were in essence a developing nation. Back then, American culture became the hottest thing - maybe now we are going to see Chinese, Indian, Cuban etc as the hottest, new thing around?
One of the many, big, unanswered questions concerning the origin of the universe is - where did the energy come from? Conservation of energy - the assumption that energy cannot be either destroyed or created - is a fundamental axiom in physics, which goes against the idea that there was a point in time before which the universe didn't exist, but after, it did. Unless, of course, one can conceive of a negative energy of equal size having been created at that same moment.
A naive consideration would say that if a mass, M, is created, then there must have an 'anti-mass', -M, as well; using Newton's equations, we would expect M and -M to repulse each other, while M would attract M and -M would attract -M (yes, doesn't make sense at stated, but follow my thought here, OK?) And, if one were to ramble on along those lines anyway, it seems tempting to look at the equations for how electric charges interact and think of electric charge as a kind of imaginary (as in complex numbers) mass. No doubt better people than I have already spotted this and worked out why it doesn't make sense, but I haven't seen their work yet.
What the actual fuck? You pull numbers from nowhere saying a kg of 'top notch' hash should cost a dollar?
Yes, I didn't quite believe it either, years ago, but then I tried to actually grow cannabis myself "at an undisclosed location". I bought something like 10 - 20 seeds online for what would be about $20, all of which grew into large, nay huge, plants, about 3.5 meters tall. I never weighed them, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that there were more than 20 kg of smokeable pot there, very potent too. So, not hash, but not far from $1 per kg of what I would have called top notch, had I been able to pronouce that at the time. In the end I threw most of it out, as it was taking over too much of my life.
So, if we factor in the way hash is produced and where (in the Middle East, mostly), perhaps the real number should be around $5 per kg; produced industrially and legally in Europe or America, I'm sure we could get the price down to that level or lower. Whatever - the point here is that there is an absolutely astonishingly obscene markup on illegal drugs. Money that not only bleeds the consumer, but also doesn't produce any tax revenue; and on top of that, much of it goes directly into financing terrorism, if one is to believe official sources (it certainly sounds plausible enough).
As far as micromanufacture goes, I work in the field.
What? You actually know what you're talking about, as opposed to somebody that I'm too modest to mention :-)
About telecommuting - don't you think we might go back to modus operandi somewhat similar to what we had centureis ago, where things like big workplaces like we know today didn't really exist, but where skilled crafts-men would ply their trade to a number of customers where needed? A sort of extended telecommuting, if you will.
As for decentralised production, maybe large volumes would be less needed? I mean, if we live in a small community of 1000 people, how many new cars would have to be produced to satisfy the needs of that community? I may only be speculating wildly, but I think it likely that if major parts of our large-scale infrastructure disappears, this will be accompanied by a cultural change away from comsumerism, and society will no longer produce and throw away at the same, staggering pace. I mean, take a car, or a mobile - how much of the need to buy a new one and throw away the old one is simply the result of unwillingness on the side of the manufaturer to make their products upgradeable? Wouldn't it be perfectly doable to design a line of cars or mobile phones that could be upgraded in small steps? I think so - it ought to be possible to make a car that could be modified in small steps all the way from a cheap, basic model with a .7 liter engine all the way to a huge, roaring super off-roader with 8-wheel drive and built-in swimming pool; you might have to change every compnent on the way, but it should be possible to so in small, very affordable steps.
no, your government bans drugs because it's a useful way of suppressing blacks, mexicans, chinese, hippies, dissidents and other undesirables.
Really? Well, perhaps that is an aspect of it, but I can think of several other factors:
- Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'. Insight and understanding don't enter into the picture, because most people's opinions are based on hearsay rather than knowledge - they have been taught not to trust their own ability to understand things, so they don't want to even try.
- Drug barons are rich and well connected to the establishment, just like others in the top of international crime. Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business, which depends on drugs being illegal and therefore very expensive. I mean, fairly priced a kg of top notch hash should cost something like 1 USD (citation: thin air, I'm just guessing), so even with the usual, over the top taxation, a gram would be astonnishingly cheap, and the drugs cartels wouldn't have any business.
Your lack of cynicism is verging on being a ringing endorsement for the current drugs laws.