100% this. It's a blatant misunderstanding of the discipline to think the main goal of computer science is to enable someone to program. Maybe you could say that being able to program is a prerequisite to start learning CS, though. In Germany the discipline is called "Informatik" which is perhaps a better term than CS. However, in the end CS is a branch of applied mathematics, but one that is important enough to warrant its own discipline. In that respect it's similar to statistics.
Most day-to-day programming tasks are fairly simple, if not a bit monotonous. Moreover (and independently of the first point), almost any team of programmers can be trained and/or forced to write highly secure, highly reliable software, e.g. using Ada/Spark or Rust or C++ with extensive code analysis tools and testing, extensive code reviewing, rule books, and so on. That software will cost many times more than normal software, though, and the development will take way longer.
The bad state of some consumer software is because of lack of liability and many other political, legal, and economic issues, not because of a lack of skilled programmers. If a company is not liable for bugs and their customers prefer fast release cycles with new features over stability, then the company has no incentive to spend more money on software quality. It all depends on how many resources you spend on company practices, code reviews, auditing, etc., up to formal verification of program correctness. You can even build a high integrity system by combining three redundant independent systems that are developed by several completely independent programming teams, maybe even using different compilers. But who is going to pay for that?
You're right about the term "fake news" but I'd like to add that talking about "US mainstream media" is way too vague to be of any use in any discussion. In the US you absolutely have to distinguish between newspapers, radio, and TV:
- Radio plays no substantial role. Some US radio hosts may be informative whole others would land in prison or pay hefty fines for libel, slander, and hate speech in almost every other civilized country.
- TV "news" is mostly hysterical crap and also very biased in the US. It has always been like that, the quality is really low almost everywhere. If you primarily get your "news" from Fox or CNN, you will remain uninformed, though certainly less than if you get your news from other internet sources like news aggregation sites.
- Most US newspapers are outstanding, no matter which political bias they have. The people who criticize newspapers do not read them. The printed versions are extremely informative, and a good way to get good background information in the US (besides other sources like foreign online news,directly tapping into press agencies, documentaries).
Every other alleged news source in the US is not only crap, it doesn't even generate any news. Left and right wing "info sites", bloggers, social media, etc. do nothing else but copying news from shady sources who copied the news in the place. Most of them employ no journalists or way too few, and even worse, most of them don't even have subscriptions for news agencies.
So in a nutshell, US TV channels and the social media are and have always been horrible 'news' sources, but printed newspapers are fairly good and will inform you.
In my experience the people who criticize mainstream media are almost universally uneducated and misinformed because they get their "news" from way less reliable sources and do not understand that somewhere there needs to be real journalist recording, taking pictures, and jotting down notes in order for there to be any news at all.
That's something that people who get their news from bloggers, radical radio hosts, social media, and shady news aggregator sites will learn the hard way.
Most UBI proponents would claim that the number of "hard cases" would stay roughly the same, and this seems overall credible to me. Surely there will always be a number of people who want to do nothing, a number of people who live on the streets or otherwise "fall off society's radar" (often due to mental illness), a number of psychopaths and murderers, a number of people who become alcoholics, and so forth, but it seems far -fetched to claim that these numbers would increase with UBI, or at least I'd like to see a general argument for making this assumption.
The idea is that those people who have the potential to do something more with their live have more opportunity to fulfill this potential with UBI, whereas the number of those who don't have the potential stays the same as before.
Although I understand your anger, your rant in this off-topic threat is a bit misleading. Germany has actually taken the refugees that it has taken because of the law, more specifically because of Article 16a of the German Constitution, the German Asylum Act, the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 signed by Germany and many other countries, and Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union signed by every member state of the European Union. In addition to that, there are of course also basic humanitarian principles, as you lay out so vividly.
Just wanted to point that out, as some of the people who let others drown in the Mediterranean Sea or that refugees should be shot at borders erroneously think they have some kind of "law" on their side. What they propose is illegal on even more levels than the above ones. There are also continuing blatant violations of International Maritime Law such as serious crimes committed by the Libyan Coast Guard who literally kill people with the tacit approval of many European governments.
What's going on in the Mediterranean Sea is an atrocity and a shame on the European nations as a whole. Generally speaking, it's very sad how many people are willing to throw aboard the very basic humanist values once they might become uncomfortable for them. Nobody should ever vote for anyone who refuses to help people in need. You could be any of those who need help at almost anytime in the future.
I'm pretty sure they get a special deal as corporate/state administration customers. Using a normal copy of Windows 10 would definitely violate German data protection standards.
Yep, unfortunately these stories almost always describe vaporware. I fondly remember all these magical reports about Tesa ROM and Tesa Worm and wonder every few years about what happened to this technology. Wo don't have the paperless office or flying cars yet either, and the robot also doesn't work for me so I have more spare time.:-/
Well, not many talked about the IRA as fundamental Christian terrorists, yet they killed 1,823 people over three decades, and nobody should talk about them in this way. There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking people become terrorists for political reasons, not because of their religion. There are about 1.8 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians on the world. Compare those numbers to the hundreds of terrorists - or maybe thousands, if you're very pessimistic - that are active in the world and it's easy to see that religion can hardly play a major role. Terrorists are basically local politicians without much of a conscience.
If you had had the pleasure of working with any good Macs like the MacPlus, for example, you'd understand what he talks about. His point is that Apple stuff is crap nowadays, and I concur. It's such a crap.
Fake news is alleged news that has intentionally been fabricated in order to spread disinformation. That's how it's defined and that's exactly what it means to companies like Facebooj, Google, and Twitter, despite some ardent attempts of a small minority of people who like to spread fake news to change the narrative and give the term some useless meaning.
You're obviously one of the latter, since otherwise you would at least acknowledge that the useless definition you mention was actually invented by Trump and a few "alt right" idiots in order to discredit people who actually fight against the spreading of disinformation. They've got to try a bit harder, people have much better bullshit detectors than you might think and those cheap "reverse rhetoric" tricks don't work on most of us.
Well, there are two possibilities. First, you're indeed kind of lost and don't know at all how to find out when something is factual. Consequently, you should have no beliefs about anything, certainly not about what's going on in the world, since you cannot figure out how to find out when something is factual. Or, second, you are one of those "post-fact" bullshitters who think that facts don't exist and are social constructions.
Both possibilities would rather bad, so I'll be charitable and assume you weren't being serious.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned but it seems to me that confirming that a substance is not toxic and predicting how toxic it may be are two very different things.
It's not where I live, because having the wintertime in the summer here in Southern Europe would be a major bummer - people here want longer sunlight in the evenings. I voted for not changing the time and have summertime the whole year.
Many companies who advertise a lot have crappy products. I've found over the decades that many large companies and corporations such as Sony or Logitech, just to name two randomly chosen but very typical examples, sell products that are strictly inferior to those of smaller, lesser known companies.
I used to use a Unicomp but for reasons of desktop space switched to a programmable Poker keyboard with blue switches. I personally prefer the snap of the Cherry switches, but the Unicomp is still an awesome keyboard. The programmable option was important to me, because I need to have Ctrl on the Capslock key and not all mechanical keyboards allow this.
Shadowbanning is a very reasonable and good measure against sockpuppets and trolls. Man up and use your real IP are don't use HN or reddit, it's as simple as that. As you might imagine, sockpuppets, bots, and trolls use VPNs and we already have enough of those. Nobody cares about the false positives.
Slashdot Mirror
100% this. It's a blatant misunderstanding of the discipline to think the main goal of computer science is to enable someone to program. Maybe you could say that being able to program is a prerequisite to start learning CS, though. In Germany the discipline is called "Informatik" which is perhaps a better term than CS. However, in the end CS is a branch of applied mathematics, but one that is important enough to warrant its own discipline. In that respect it's similar to statistics.
Most day-to-day programming tasks are fairly simple, if not a bit monotonous. Moreover (and independently of the first point), almost any team of programmers can be trained and/or forced to write highly secure, highly reliable software, e.g. using Ada/Spark or Rust or C++ with extensive code analysis tools and testing, extensive code reviewing, rule books, and so on. That software will cost many times more than normal software, though, and the development will take way longer.
The bad state of some consumer software is because of lack of liability and many other political, legal, and economic issues, not because of a lack of skilled programmers. If a company is not liable for bugs and their customers prefer fast release cycles with new features over stability, then the company has no incentive to spend more money on software quality. It all depends on how many resources you spend on company practices, code reviews, auditing, etc., up to formal verification of program correctness. You can even build a high integrity system by combining three redundant independent systems that are developed by several completely independent programming teams, maybe even using different compilers. But who is going to pay for that?
Yes, it's full of psychopaths. I can't explain why either, it's bizarre.
You're right about the term "fake news" but I'd like to add that talking about "US mainstream media" is way too vague to be of any use in any discussion. In the US you absolutely have to distinguish between newspapers, radio, and TV:
- Radio plays no substantial role. Some US radio hosts may be informative whole others would land in prison or pay hefty fines for libel, slander, and hate speech in almost every other civilized country.
- TV "news" is mostly hysterical crap and also very biased in the US. It has always been like that, the quality is really low almost everywhere. If you primarily get your "news" from Fox or CNN, you will remain uninformed, though certainly less than if you get your news from other internet sources like news aggregation sites.
- Most US newspapers are outstanding, no matter which political bias they have. The people who criticize newspapers do not read them. The printed versions are extremely informative, and a good way to get good background information in the US (besides other sources like foreign online news,directly tapping into press agencies, documentaries).
Every other alleged news source in the US is not only crap, it doesn't even generate any news. Left and right wing "info sites", bloggers, social media, etc. do nothing else but copying news from shady sources who copied the news in the place. Most of them employ no journalists or way too few, and even worse, most of them don't even have subscriptions for news agencies.
So in a nutshell, US TV channels and the social media are and have always been horrible 'news' sources, but printed newspapers are fairly good and will inform you.
In my experience the people who criticize mainstream media are almost universally uneducated and misinformed because they get their "news" from way less reliable sources and do not understand that somewhere there needs to be real journalist recording, taking pictures, and jotting down notes in order for there to be any news at all.
That's something that people who get their news from bloggers, radical radio hosts, social media, and shady news aggregator sites will learn the hard way.
Most UBI proponents would claim that the number of "hard cases" would stay roughly the same, and this seems overall credible to me. Surely there will always be a number of people who want to do nothing, a number of people who live on the streets or otherwise "fall off society's radar" (often due to mental illness), a number of psychopaths and murderers, a number of people who become alcoholics, and so forth, but it seems far -fetched to claim that these numbers would increase with UBI, or at least I'd like to see a general argument for making this assumption.
The idea is that those people who have the potential to do something more with their live have more opportunity to fulfill this potential with UBI, whereas the number of those who don't have the potential stays the same as before.
Although I understand your anger, your rant in this off-topic threat is a bit misleading. Germany has actually taken the refugees that it has taken because of the law, more specifically because of Article 16a of the German Constitution, the German Asylum Act, the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 signed by Germany and many other countries, and Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union signed by every member state of the European Union. In addition to that, there are of course also basic humanitarian principles, as you lay out so vividly.
Just wanted to point that out, as some of the people who let others drown in the Mediterranean Sea or that refugees should be shot at borders erroneously think they have some kind of "law" on their side. What they propose is illegal on even more levels than the above ones. There are also continuing blatant violations of International Maritime Law such as serious crimes committed by the Libyan Coast Guard who literally kill people with the tacit approval of many European governments.
What's going on in the Mediterranean Sea is an atrocity and a shame on the European nations as a whole. Generally speaking, it's very sad how many people are willing to throw aboard the very basic humanist values once they might become uncomfortable for them. Nobody should ever vote for anyone who refuses to help people in need. You could be any of those who need help at almost anytime in the future.
I'm pretty sure they get a special deal as corporate/state administration customers. Using a normal copy of Windows 10 would definitely violate German data protection standards.
Yep, unfortunately these stories almost always describe vaporware. I fondly remember all these magical reports about Tesa ROM and Tesa Worm and wonder every few years about what happened to this technology. Wo don't have the paperless office or flying cars yet either, and the robot also doesn't work for me so I have more spare time. :-/
Google is not trustworthy.
Well, not many talked about the IRA as fundamental Christian terrorists, yet they killed 1,823 people over three decades, and nobody should talk about them in this way. There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking people become terrorists for political reasons, not because of their religion. There are about 1.8 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians on the world. Compare those numbers to the hundreds of terrorists - or maybe thousands, if you're very pessimistic - that are active in the world and it's easy to see that religion can hardly play a major role. Terrorists are basically local politicians without much of a conscience.
If you had had the pleasure of working with any good Macs like the MacPlus, for example, you'd understand what he talks about. His point is that Apple stuff is crap nowadays, and I concur. It's such a crap.
Fake news is alleged news that has intentionally been fabricated in order to spread disinformation. That's how it's defined and that's exactly what it means to companies like Facebooj, Google, and Twitter, despite some ardent attempts of a small minority of people who like to spread fake news to change the narrative and give the term some useless meaning.
You're obviously one of the latter, since otherwise you would at least acknowledge that the useless definition you mention was actually invented by Trump and a few "alt right" idiots in order to discredit people who actually fight against the spreading of disinformation. They've got to try a bit harder, people have much better bullshit detectors than you might think and those cheap "reverse rhetoric" tricks don't work on most of us.
How do you know when something is factual?
Well, there are two possibilities. First, you're indeed kind of lost and don't know at all how to find out when something is factual. Consequently, you should have no beliefs about anything, certainly not about what's going on in the world, since you cannot figure out how to find out when something is factual. Or, second, you are one of those "post-fact" bullshitters who think that facts don't exist and are social constructions.
Both possibilities would rather bad, so I'll be charitable and assume you weren't being serious.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned but it seems to me that confirming that a substance is not toxic and predicting how toxic it may be are two very different things.
That's simply false.
Summertime the whole year round is the right way to go for most countries. People stay up longer in the evenings than they used to.
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
It's not where I live, because having the wintertime in the summer here in Southern Europe would be a major bummer - people here want longer sunlight in the evenings. I voted for not changing the time and have summertime the whole year.
Many companies who advertise a lot have crappy products. I've found over the decades that many large companies and corporations such as Sony or Logitech, just to name two randomly chosen but very typical examples, sell products that are strictly inferior to those of smaller, lesser known companies.
I used to use a Unicomp but for reasons of desktop space switched to a programmable Poker keyboard with blue switches. I personally prefer the snap of the Cherry switches, but the Unicomp is still an awesome keyboard. The programmable option was important to me, because I need to have Ctrl on the Capslock key and not all mechanical keyboards allow this.
I don't know, maybe you guys should focus on clean, lead-free tap water first.
Shadowbanning is a very reasonable and good measure against sockpuppets and trolls. Man up and use your real IP are don't use HN or reddit, it's as simple as that. As you might imagine, sockpuppets, bots, and trolls use VPNs and we already have enough of those. Nobody cares about the false positives.
Most techies appreciate both of them, I'd suppose.