Some of the worst arguments I see on here are that China causes more carbon emissions. Sure imagine you're stranded on a boat with 10 other people and wearing a red shirt while everyone has a blue shirt. You're eating 5 times the amount of rations but arguing that you shouldn't cut back because "blue" is already eating more. This is why emissions per capita matters. Carbon emissions are directly related to food production and general economic wealth of a nation. As a resident of a well off nation, it stands to hurt us the least to cut back a little. The only way China can cut back is to effectively downgrade their economics so badly that it will probably start killing people.
So yeah, wealth redistribution it is, but folks forget that we're already doing that. There are far far more poorer folks out there worldwide and when nature inevitably bites back due to climate change it will hit the poor much harder but we share the same planet. Expect more environmental refugees and don't be surprised if folks start fighting more. After all if you're staving to death because you don't have water or food or a way of living, blowing up your neighbour who seems to have everything, deserved or not seems like a good option.
It's why we should pro-actively try to fix this even if it seems hopeless, letting it go to the latter doesn't sound like fun at all.
I know cheating has always been an issue in schools but I can't imagine students who do are doing themselves a favour when they eventually reach the workplace. A lot of programming jobs are screened by requiring you to write code on paper at the Interview without any aids. So if you don't know what you're doing because all you've done is cheat, I'm not sure how you expect to be hired. And as great as stackoverflow is for looking up solutions, sometimes they're wrong, written incorrectly or you're trying to figure out how someone else's code works. Good luck doing your job then.
Most consumer drones aren't too heavy and mostly plastic the latest DJI drone (Mavic Pro) is about 2.2lb or 1KG. It'll hurt but not likely to kill you. Also if it's close enough to shoot down, it's probably too close to venue or whatever the Drone is zipping around. Another option would be a directed microwave beam which would knock it out of the sky since it's not likely very well shielded. Adding a backdoor or hacking isn't likely the easiest way of doing it and besides, it wouldn't even affect home built DIY drones which use custom hardware.
As far as terrorism, there's not really much you can do about that. Cars can be used as bombs too or the cheapo pressure cooker. You can probably build one from hobby parts to carry 5-10lbs easily but don't forget, a drone is simply a delivery method. Most folks go for the cheap and easy and a drone is nothing like that. Besides anything carrying significant weight is going to be loud and attract a lot of attention and have a lot of traceable parts.
I don't think leaving a hack-able vulnerability is a good idea but sure why not use something like a T-shirt Canon that shoots a Net? It wouldn't be that difficult to shoot down a consumer drone and fairly safe to do so. Instead of crippling everyone with restrictions, just shoot down or catch the folks who blatantly break the rules. You don't even really need to fine because drones are pretty expensive. The loss alone should teach someone a lesson.
I think the main problem is if you look middle-eastern and the border agents are having a particularly bad day then you might get denied entry for no apparent reason at all. This has happened to several Canadians and apparently without even an explanation. This has caused entire conferences and school trips to be cancelled and or moved to Canada because on a class field trip, no teacher wants to have to deal with a situation where a student is left behind. Heck there was an Iranian Student who was invited to speak to a US trade show on refrigeration because of something new he had invented who got denied entry. Can you imagine how disappointing it would be to lose your lead speaker at a Conference because of such issues. This plus poor currency exchange, apparently gun violence issues and possibility issues at the border are scaring people away.
Maybe this is because it's a Chinese made product but you'd think DJI would think that maybe giving the customer the ultimate choice on what their product can't and can do? I've heard that their drones are already limited to 500m for altitude which for most uses is plenty but runs into problems when folks are staying close to the ground hugging mountains over 500m. They really should adopt more of a "warning policy" in that the system should warn you that you're exceeding limits with a disclaimer. After all at around a $1000 it isn't exactly what you call a child's toy.
I've seen the amazing landscape and scenery that enthusiasts have been able to get aside from probably the fun of flying a drone. I've owned and got good at flying coaxial helicopters for years but with the paranoid laws in Canada and all these crazy restrictions even by the manufacturers, I think they're killing their own bread and butter. It's made me think this isn't worth investing in, and to think I've used model rockets that have blown way over those height restrictions.
As one off-duty police office noted on drones, the consumer ones weight far less and are more fragile than a Canada Goose. Try chopping a 20lb Turkey in half compared to a 2-4lb extremely fragile drone and you'll get the idea quickly. Considering it usually takes a flock of geese to bring down a plane and even that's rare, it's highly unlikely a consumer drone will ever bring down a plane short of it being a military drone.
To think that early NASA engineers used essentially pipe bombs for their toy rockets while we're panicking over a few pounds of plastic that would likely give you a few cuts at worst if you managed to ram it into yourself.
Well first of all, I would say you're really up the creek without a paddle if you try something like this. This falls under epic bad life choices. Still, I remember watching a spy documentary and strangely even seemingly reliable folks will sometimes leak information for the thrill, some sort of mid-life crisis or even due to depression. Former actual Russian spies have said sometimes it isn't even for that much money. It's unfortunate but something that folks in the Intelligence community have to deal with time and time again.
Sony actually had a prototype MP3 Walkman at some point but was forced to give up on the project due to fighting with their audio division over concerns of consumer copyright issues which resulted in Apple pretty much stealing their lunch in this area. Otherwise I wouldn't be surprised if mp3 walkmans would have existed instead of Ipods. Sony had an amazing line of VPC-Z series laptops which were actually assembled in the US or Japan. I own one that's almost a decade old and it's still on par with modern laptops in performance, weight and size. (Think Razor like laptop) Sadly after I believe a tsunami wiped out their manufacturing facilities and problems with their overall company forced them to sell away their Vaio line. They were one of the first companies also to experiment with hybrid graphics and external gpu cards on their laptops. They also sold one of the first consumer OLED displays that cost more than common sense too. So it's not that their products were bad, it's a lot of bad execution and decisions.
So company that I've never heard of goes out of business... Umm why isn't that a surprise? How's this even news? I initially actually mistook the company name for "La Crosse" which makes a lot of home weather monitoring equipment. I wonder if anyone else thought this...
I actually program in the field and while I admit.NET is pretty awesome if you program specifically in Windows and if you aren't looking for performance! It isn't meant for the high performance edge applications that C and C++ are able to handle. Besides, all four languages.NET, C, C++ and Java all have some similarities with each other. It's about as stupid as saying because I drive a SUV that I can't drive a truck. Sure there's differences but anyone who calls themselves a programmer should be able to switch fairly easily. Java itself is a horrible use of resources, the few games I've seen written in them run like molasses and that problem in itself hasn't really changed over the years.
As far as AI taking programming jobs, don't make me laugh. AI is nowhere near that level yet. An AI that can program is an example of self-aware AI that can program itself. Even if it could, I'm not sure if anyone would really want to risk it. Think about it, let's fire all the programmers and get the computer to program itself to help us. Eh, what if something goes wrong? What if it decides to go the way of skynet?
While the cloud may have it's benefits, not everything will go there. Communication isn't that fast and some information is best kept off the web.
Written by a business type who has no idea how programming works except for the next big thing. Not even realizing how much stuff is based on legacy architecture.
I still find it disappointing that there would be climate deniers. Yeah sure the sea is going to rise a 1/2 foot, no big deal... Well first of all, what's causing the 1/2 foot rise in oceans if there isn't climate change. It's like saying, oh well I feel healthy and I can't possibility have cancer even thou my doctor is telling me all his blood tests are coming back positive, it's a conspiracy by the doctors to make more money!
Humans are also inherently less than pro-active on many many issues wanting to believe things are better than they are until they're not. As a result we end up building on floodplains or too close to oceans or water because well it can't happen. The problem with climate change is it's not a "sudden" change but it increases the risk of getting hurt. It's like not wearing a seatbelt because you usually don't crash. The bottom line is even if you don't believe in climate change, there are millions of people at risk for when water levels rise. It will hurt us all in increased taxes, insurance or economic failure when it comes. Isn't that enough to do something? Or should we just sit around, too cheap to invest in a seatbelt because only other people crash?
To be honest, I'm not sure how this is a surprise. Chromebooks are cheap, of reasonable quality and provide everything you need minus most of the viruses and problems with Windows. Administrators are also sure that kids arn't just flat out gaming on their Chromebooks (lack of space and video games) whereas on a PC you're never entirely sure. I'm sure a lot of us have heard kids or been kids who installed video games into the system.
I mostly trust Google and believe they're mostly honest and in the Consumer's interest. The problem is while Google is trustworthy and reliable now, it's hard to say what will happen when Google's founders pass away and in the future which is why putting all your eggs in one basket is a dangerous thing, even if it's a great basket. Nothing we've made lasts forever.
First ask yourself is Cobol good for what it's used for and is switching to another language "better". A lot of languages are created for a specific purpose and when something better comes along, that's when you should probably phase it out. Switching to another language so I can get a cheap / inexperienced programmer who will likely make a huge mess of it is not a good idea.
Second, anyone who calls themselves a reasonable programmer should be able to adopt another language. It might take them sometime to become efficient or skilled at it but the point is a good programmer should be able to pick it up. I remember in my final year of university we got exposure to some downright weird or difficult to program languages like LISP and we were still able to make do.
Third, ignoring the issue is the equivalent of saying "Screw it!" and kicking the bucket down the road making it someone else's problem. This is never a good solution, have a phase out plan, train some employees or a fallback. Don't just wait till your last skilled programmer retires and you're now up the creek without a paddle.
Not that I have anything against EVs, I own one myself after all (Volt) and it's worked out really well for me but I think folks are misunderstanding marketing Tesla uses for it's SuperCharger network.
The SuperCharger network is not free, owners have essentially "paid" for it through the cost of their vehicle. Also it's been announced Telsa is thinking of charging Model 3 owners for the network because the profit margin is so narrow that there's nothing left to pay for the "free" power. Telsa also doesn't expect you to hog the network for daily charging. Almost all EV owners charge their car at home, at night when they sleep. It's how the Volt works for me. If everyone who owned a Telsa decided to supercharge all the time, there literally would be not enough chargers for everyone.
Tesla uses a proprietary charger that despite free patents is their own specific design. Every other EV uses an IEEE standard plug charger. It's so standard you can buy third party chargers for Volt, Leaf, Bolt, whatever but you won't find a third party making a specific Tesla charger.
As great as the supercharger network is, it doesn't exist everywhere. In Northern Canada where I am, there's no supercharger network. Even if there was one, you are going to purposely introduce several hour delays in your trip if you're going cross country. Not only that but if you miss the charging network somehow or end up lost, you'll need a tow truck to get you to a charge point instead of a can of gas. It's why I chose the Volt, it's gas when you need it for trips and cold weather but a pure EV for daily use.
Tesla's are super expensive compared to a Volt. This is because instead of using a compact engine to back up the battery, they try to compensate using a massive expensive battery instead. The price difference of the Telsa alone could pay for a lifetime of gas or several lifetimes of electricity.
Having been on both ends of the employment spectrum from working for call centres for years to height of my career so far as a programmer for a Telco, I can say that we don't have any simple solutions for this issue. It's not a new issue either and one that's been discussed for years. The problem is that in any society where everyone begins as equals some will rise far above the rest. Some morally / legitimately earned and some not so much. It's natural and if you compare it to nature it forms something similar to a food web pyramid. In any pyramid there's very few at the top and lot of everyone else at the bottom. As technology advances, our ability to make more of our essentials and "stuff" to fill our needs increases meaning we need fewer and fewer workers with time. The ones that remain become more and more skilled and probably more wealthy as well. The only way this is sustainable is to have the entire population "consume" ever more goods to ensure that everyone stays employed. This actually worked for a while as we definitely consume more goods and resources than generations a few centuries back. The problem is at some point you run out of resources so you can't keep doing this forever. If at some point the wealth imbalance reaches a breaking point then the entire system will attempt to re-balance with force resulting in collapse of society and a period of violence which is never good for anyone. If you have all the food and everyone else is starving, you're going to need to learn to share regardless of whether you got it legitimately or not or you'll find yourself at the short end of the stick. So that's what this is, an attempt to see if we can re-balance the wealth peacefully. It's logical, moral and an attempt to starve off impending doom for all of us.
This is unfortunately how it's going to go. I don't see spraying clouds with salt essentially as being a huge problem as the oceans have a lot of salt so it will likely just fall back in. If it works, it might help to save their reef which is apparently worth billions to their economy. The trade-off is cooling an area that large could cause spin off effects that could affect other parts of the world. I wonder how many climate change deniers are against them doing this? After all if burning a river of oil day after day won't do anything then what would spraying some salt do?
When push comes to shove, a country is going to act in it's own best interests to protect itself. If their climate-patch attempts break some other country's climate like ours, I'm curious to see how we'll treat it. After all it's not like all the manufactured goods and energy we consume could be having an effect on the planet right?
Considering all the trouble over people flying small drones, imagine the trouble with people flying objects that could easily take out your house if it crashes! It's not that I wouldn't love having a flying vehicle to go places. The scenery alone would be pretty cool but the fact that if your engine stalls or something breaks due to poor maintenance is going to result in a very nasty crash is not encouraging. Commercial aircraft is relatively safe because of good maintenance and pretty extensive pilot training. Compare that to driving and you'll see a pretty drastic difference. Maybe a possibility is a fully-automated flight system / transport that takes you from point A to B where maintenance is out of your hands but that's hardly the flying car experience folks expect.
In all honestly, this could also lead to some really bad programming considering if you never Interact with anyone it could result in you coding in a way that results in unmanageable code or something that won't work with a team. Besides, I actually like some office interaction now and then so I don't get completely locked into my own ideas and hobbies.
I'm a university graduate myself in Comp Sci and what I often find missing in programmers that never went to post-secondary education is the theory of why certain things are done the way they are. While there often aren't any hard rules, some topics like how to deal with multi-threading, deadlocks and linear optimization will not be things that folks are good at programming unless they've had some exposure to the theory. Or programmers come up with the wrong solutions for complex problems which sort of work but usually less optimal or somewhat flawed. I should knowx I worked on a deadlock problem in high school and came up with something that worked but not reliably.
That said, experience and whether someone is actually good at programming can't be determined by a degree. I've met folks who are talented programmers who never went to school and folks who went to university who couldn't program if their life depended on it. About all the advice I could give to companies would be to take your best programmer (not your best HR or Manager) person who understands what they're doing and to have them pick the candidate to hire based on some actual programming tests. Talented programmers know each other and besides, you do want your programmers to work together I would assume.
I honestly think something's wrong with this strategy. Since when is teaching math which is usually a dry / boring subject going to make someone interested in STEM fields? I'm a Computer Science graduate in the field and although math is important, in real life you usually don't need anything past high school in typical daily programming. Do the science first! I remember when I was young, I was attracted to the computer first whether it was programming to make it do things for me or just flat out gaming. It was later that math became interesting because I realized it gave me to tools to do what I wanted to do. If you try to make computers interesting by first burying them in complex and or difficult to understand math, I am almost certain you'll have the opposite effect.
I think the main problem with a head transplant is how do you reconnect all the nerves you've broken. They've found that broken nerves don't tend to reconnect. Nerves aren't exactly like wires, they're more like a living tree. If you chop down a tree but change your mind, you'll need to glue the tree together and hope that it grows back together. If it doesn't want to do that like as in nerves, that is not going to work.
Having your head disconnected from the body (even if you have all the blood vessels in place) is a problem. A lot of functions like breathing, heatbeat, and processing food is controlled by your brain and the lack of one isn't going to be great for the body.
The way Intel plans on using Optane memory, yes it will most certainly improve the speed of HDs by caching but to say it will always outperform an SSD is an outright lie. For starters if you're working with unusually large datasets it likely won't all fit in Optane memory and unless your cache is highly intelligent and can read ahead, it's likely that things will load slowly on the first attempt. Then for laptops there's also the bonus of not destroying the HD if your laptop gets bumped in the wrong way or treated with a bit of abuse when operating. If this worked so well then Seagate's hybrid SSD / HD drives should be almost everything but it isn't.
I think a good simple explanation is that to get higher and higher precision time measurements it takes more and more energy. At some point you're using too much energy in that it's having an effect on time itself. So there's probably some sort of limit on how far you can go.
If Google's lawsuit on theft of trade secrets and intellectual property and patent violations goes though, I suspect this will kill Uber's self-driving program. Last I recall Google was actually the farthest ahead on this "self-driving" technology and from the sounds of it the safest to rely on.
I'm not an engineer but I have worked with engineers and I do have a strong CS background as that's my education. I think something that you'll need to realize is that while it's possible to maybe train or teach someone a field that they never had any background in, it doesn't mean they'll ever be able to come close to someone who's worked on IT their entire lives. There's too many things that experience teaches you that you would never hope to know. So in reality, hire a specialist to help everyone or just accept the fact that your IT infrastructure is never going to be as good as it should be.
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Some of the worst arguments I see on here are that China causes more carbon emissions. Sure imagine you're stranded on a boat with 10 other people and wearing a red shirt while everyone has a blue shirt. You're eating 5 times the amount of rations but arguing that you shouldn't cut back because "blue" is already eating more. This is why emissions per capita matters. Carbon emissions are directly related to food production and general economic wealth of a nation. As a resident of a well off nation, it stands to hurt us the least to cut back a little. The only way China can cut back is to effectively downgrade their economics so badly that it will probably start killing people.
So yeah, wealth redistribution it is, but folks forget that we're already doing that. There are far far more poorer folks out there worldwide and when nature inevitably bites back due to climate change it will hit the poor much harder but we share the same planet. Expect more environmental refugees and don't be surprised if folks start fighting more. After all if you're staving to death because you don't have water or food or a way of living, blowing up your neighbour who seems to have everything, deserved or not seems like a good option.
It's why we should pro-actively try to fix this even if it seems hopeless, letting it go to the latter doesn't sound like fun at all.
I know cheating has always been an issue in schools but I can't imagine students who do are doing themselves a favour when they eventually reach the workplace. A lot of programming jobs are screened by requiring you to write code on paper at the Interview without any aids. So if you don't know what you're doing because all you've done is cheat, I'm not sure how you expect to be hired. And as great as stackoverflow is for looking up solutions, sometimes they're wrong, written incorrectly or you're trying to figure out how someone else's code works. Good luck doing your job then.
Most consumer drones aren't too heavy and mostly plastic the latest DJI drone (Mavic Pro) is about 2.2lb or 1KG. It'll hurt but not likely to kill you. Also if it's close enough to shoot down, it's probably too close to venue or whatever the Drone is zipping around. Another option would be a directed microwave beam which would knock it out of the sky since it's not likely very well shielded. Adding a backdoor or hacking isn't likely the easiest way of doing it and besides, it wouldn't even affect home built DIY drones which use custom hardware.
As far as terrorism, there's not really much you can do about that. Cars can be used as bombs too or the cheapo pressure cooker. You can probably build one from hobby parts to carry 5-10lbs easily but don't forget, a drone is simply a delivery method. Most folks go for the cheap and easy and a drone is nothing like that. Besides anything carrying significant weight is going to be loud and attract a lot of attention and have a lot of traceable parts.
I don't think leaving a hack-able vulnerability is a good idea but sure why not use something like a T-shirt Canon that shoots a Net? It wouldn't be that difficult to shoot down a consumer drone and fairly safe to do so. Instead of crippling everyone with restrictions, just shoot down or catch the folks who blatantly break the rules. You don't even really need to fine because drones are pretty expensive. The loss alone should teach someone a lesson.
I think the main problem is if you look middle-eastern and the border agents are having a particularly bad day then you might get denied entry for no apparent reason at all. This has happened to several Canadians and apparently without even an explanation. This has caused entire conferences and school trips to be cancelled and or moved to Canada because on a class field trip, no teacher wants to have to deal with a situation where a student is left behind. Heck there was an Iranian Student who was invited to speak to a US trade show on refrigeration because of something new he had invented who got denied entry. Can you imagine how disappointing it would be to lose your lead speaker at a Conference because of such issues. This plus poor currency exchange, apparently gun violence issues and possibility issues at the border are scaring people away.
Maybe this is because it's a Chinese made product but you'd think DJI would think that maybe giving the customer the ultimate choice on what their product can't and can do? I've heard that their drones are already limited to 500m for altitude which for most uses is plenty but runs into problems when folks are staying close to the ground hugging mountains over 500m. They really should adopt more of a "warning policy" in that the system should warn you that you're exceeding limits with a disclaimer. After all at around a $1000 it isn't exactly what you call a child's toy.
I've seen the amazing landscape and scenery that enthusiasts have been able to get aside from probably the fun of flying a drone. I've owned and got good at flying coaxial helicopters for years but with the paranoid laws in Canada and all these crazy restrictions even by the manufacturers, I think they're killing their own bread and butter. It's made me think this isn't worth investing in, and to think I've used model rockets that have blown way over those height restrictions.
As one off-duty police office noted on drones, the consumer ones weight far less and are more fragile than a Canada Goose. Try chopping a 20lb Turkey in half compared to a 2-4lb extremely fragile drone and you'll get the idea quickly. Considering it usually takes a flock of geese to bring down a plane and even that's rare, it's highly unlikely a consumer drone will ever bring down a plane short of it being a military drone.
To think that early NASA engineers used essentially pipe bombs for their toy rockets while we're panicking over a few pounds of plastic that would likely give you a few cuts at worst if you managed to ram it into yourself.
Well first of all, I would say you're really up the creek without a paddle if you try something like this. This falls under epic bad life choices. Still, I remember watching a spy documentary and strangely even seemingly reliable folks will sometimes leak information for the thrill, some sort of mid-life crisis or even due to depression. Former actual Russian spies have said sometimes it isn't even for that much money. It's unfortunate but something that folks in the Intelligence community have to deal with time and time again.
Sony actually had a prototype MP3 Walkman at some point but was forced to give up on the project due to fighting with their audio division over concerns of consumer copyright issues which resulted in Apple pretty much stealing their lunch in this area. Otherwise I wouldn't be surprised if mp3 walkmans would have existed instead of Ipods. Sony had an amazing line of VPC-Z series laptops which were actually assembled in the US or Japan. I own one that's almost a decade old and it's still on par with modern laptops in performance, weight and size. (Think Razor like laptop) Sadly after I believe a tsunami wiped out their manufacturing facilities and problems with their overall company forced them to sell away their Vaio line. They were one of the first companies also to experiment with hybrid graphics and external gpu cards on their laptops. They also sold one of the first consumer OLED displays that cost more than common sense too. So it's not that their products were bad, it's a lot of bad execution and decisions.
So company that I've never heard of goes out of business... Umm why isn't that a surprise? How's this even news? I initially actually mistook the company name for "La Crosse" which makes a lot of home weather monitoring equipment. I wonder if anyone else thought this...
I actually program in the field and while I admit .NET is pretty awesome if you program specifically in Windows and if you aren't looking for performance! It isn't meant for the high performance edge applications that C and C++ are able to handle. Besides, all four languages .NET, C, C++ and Java all have some similarities with each other. It's about as stupid as saying because I drive a SUV that I can't drive a truck. Sure there's differences but anyone who calls themselves a programmer should be able to switch fairly easily. Java itself is a horrible use of resources, the few games I've seen written in them run like molasses and that problem in itself hasn't really changed over the years.
As far as AI taking programming jobs, don't make me laugh. AI is nowhere near that level yet. An AI that can program is an example of self-aware AI that can program itself. Even if it could, I'm not sure if anyone would really want to risk it. Think about it, let's fire all the programmers and get the computer to program itself to help us. Eh, what if something goes wrong? What if it decides to go the way of skynet?
While the cloud may have it's benefits, not everything will go there. Communication isn't that fast and some information is best kept off the web.
Written by a business type who has no idea how programming works except for the next big thing. Not even realizing how much stuff is based on legacy architecture.
I still find it disappointing that there would be climate deniers. Yeah sure the sea is going to rise a 1/2 foot, no big deal... Well first of all, what's causing the 1/2 foot rise in oceans if there isn't climate change. It's like saying, oh well I feel healthy and I can't possibility have cancer even thou my doctor is telling me all his blood tests are coming back positive, it's a conspiracy by the doctors to make more money!
Humans are also inherently less than pro-active on many many issues wanting to believe things are better than they are until they're not. As a result we end up building on floodplains or too close to oceans or water because well it can't happen. The problem with climate change is it's not a "sudden" change but it increases the risk of getting hurt. It's like not wearing a seatbelt because you usually don't crash. The bottom line is even if you don't believe in climate change, there are millions of people at risk for when water levels rise. It will hurt us all in increased taxes, insurance or economic failure when it comes. Isn't that enough to do something? Or should we just sit around, too cheap to invest in a seatbelt because only other people crash?
To be honest, I'm not sure how this is a surprise. Chromebooks are cheap, of reasonable quality and provide everything you need minus most of the viruses and problems with Windows. Administrators are also sure that kids arn't just flat out gaming on their Chromebooks (lack of space and video games) whereas on a PC you're never entirely sure. I'm sure a lot of us have heard kids or been kids who installed video games into the system.
I mostly trust Google and believe they're mostly honest and in the Consumer's interest. The problem is while Google is trustworthy and reliable now, it's hard to say what will happen when Google's founders pass away and in the future which is why putting all your eggs in one basket is a dangerous thing, even if it's a great basket. Nothing we've made lasts forever.
First ask yourself is Cobol good for what it's used for and is switching to another language "better". A lot of languages are created for a specific purpose and when something better comes along, that's when you should probably phase it out. Switching to another language so I can get a cheap / inexperienced programmer who will likely make a huge mess of it is not a good idea.
Second, anyone who calls themselves a reasonable programmer should be able to adopt another language. It might take them sometime to become efficient or skilled at it but the point is a good programmer should be able to pick it up. I remember in my final year of university we got exposure to some downright weird or difficult to program languages like LISP and we were still able to make do.
Third, ignoring the issue is the equivalent of saying "Screw it!" and kicking the bucket down the road making it someone else's problem. This is never a good solution, have a phase out plan, train some employees or a fallback. Don't just wait till your last skilled programmer retires and you're now up the creek without a paddle.
Not that I have anything against EVs, I own one myself after all (Volt) and it's worked out really well for me but I think folks are misunderstanding marketing Tesla uses for it's SuperCharger network.
The SuperCharger network is not free, owners have essentially "paid" for it through the cost of their vehicle. Also it's been announced Telsa is thinking of charging Model 3 owners for the network because the profit margin is so narrow that there's nothing left to pay for the "free" power. Telsa also doesn't expect you to hog the network for daily charging. Almost all EV owners charge their car at home, at night when they sleep. It's how the Volt works for me. If everyone who owned a Telsa decided to supercharge all the time, there literally would be not enough chargers for everyone.
Tesla uses a proprietary charger that despite free patents is their own specific design. Every other EV uses an IEEE standard plug charger. It's so standard you can buy third party chargers for Volt, Leaf, Bolt, whatever but you won't find a third party making a specific Tesla charger.
As great as the supercharger network is, it doesn't exist everywhere. In Northern Canada where I am, there's no supercharger network. Even if there was one, you are going to purposely introduce several hour delays in your trip if you're going cross country. Not only that but if you miss the charging network somehow or end up lost, you'll need a tow truck to get you to a charge point instead of a can of gas. It's why I chose the Volt, it's gas when you need it for trips and cold weather but a pure EV for daily use.
Tesla's are super expensive compared to a Volt. This is because instead of using a compact engine to back up the battery, they try to compensate using a massive expensive battery instead. The price difference of the Telsa alone could pay for a lifetime of gas or several lifetimes of electricity.
Having been on both ends of the employment spectrum from working for call centres for years to height of my career so far as a programmer for a Telco, I can say that we don't have any simple solutions for this issue. It's not a new issue either and one that's been discussed for years. The problem is that in any society where everyone begins as equals some will rise far above the rest. Some morally / legitimately earned and some not so much. It's natural and if you compare it to nature it forms something similar to a food web pyramid. In any pyramid there's very few at the top and lot of everyone else at the bottom. As technology advances, our ability to make more of our essentials and "stuff" to fill our needs increases meaning we need fewer and fewer workers with time. The ones that remain become more and more skilled and probably more wealthy as well. The only way this is sustainable is to have the entire population "consume" ever more goods to ensure that everyone stays employed. This actually worked for a while as we definitely consume more goods and resources than generations a few centuries back. The problem is at some point you run out of resources so you can't keep doing this forever. If at some point the wealth imbalance reaches a breaking point then the entire system will attempt to re-balance with force resulting in collapse of society and a period of violence which is never good for anyone. If you have all the food and everyone else is starving, you're going to need to learn to share regardless of whether you got it legitimately or not or you'll find yourself at the short end of the stick. So that's what this is, an attempt to see if we can re-balance the wealth peacefully. It's logical, moral and an attempt to starve off impending doom for all of us.
This is unfortunately how it's going to go. I don't see spraying clouds with salt essentially as being a huge problem as the oceans have a lot of salt so it will likely just fall back in. If it works, it might help to save their reef which is apparently worth billions to their economy. The trade-off is cooling an area that large could cause spin off effects that could affect other parts of the world. I wonder how many climate change deniers are against them doing this? After all if burning a river of oil day after day won't do anything then what would spraying some salt do?
When push comes to shove, a country is going to act in it's own best interests to protect itself. If their climate-patch attempts break some other country's climate like ours, I'm curious to see how we'll treat it. After all it's not like all the manufactured goods and energy we consume could be having an effect on the planet right?
Considering all the trouble over people flying small drones, imagine the trouble with people flying objects that could easily take out your house if it crashes! It's not that I wouldn't love having a flying vehicle to go places. The scenery alone would be pretty cool but the fact that if your engine stalls or something breaks due to poor maintenance is going to result in a very nasty crash is not encouraging. Commercial aircraft is relatively safe because of good maintenance and pretty extensive pilot training. Compare that to driving and you'll see a pretty drastic difference. Maybe a possibility is a fully-automated flight system / transport that takes you from point A to B where maintenance is out of your hands but that's hardly the flying car experience folks expect.
In all honestly, this could also lead to some really bad programming considering if you never Interact with anyone it could result in you coding in a way that results in unmanageable code or something that won't work with a team. Besides, I actually like some office interaction now and then so I don't get completely locked into my own ideas and hobbies.
I'm a university graduate myself in Comp Sci and what I often find missing in programmers that never went to post-secondary education is the theory of why certain things are done the way they are. While there often aren't any hard rules, some topics like how to deal with multi-threading, deadlocks and linear optimization will not be things that folks are good at programming unless they've had some exposure to the theory. Or programmers come up with the wrong solutions for complex problems which sort of work but usually less optimal or somewhat flawed. I should knowx I worked on a deadlock problem in high school and came up with something that worked but not reliably.
That said, experience and whether someone is actually good at programming can't be determined by a degree. I've met folks who are talented programmers who never went to school and folks who went to university who couldn't program if their life depended on it. About all the advice I could give to companies would be to take your best programmer (not your best HR or Manager) person who understands what they're doing and to have them pick the candidate to hire based on some actual programming tests. Talented programmers know each other and besides, you do want your programmers to work together I would assume.
I honestly think something's wrong with this strategy. Since when is teaching math which is usually a dry / boring subject going to make someone interested in STEM fields? I'm a Computer Science graduate in the field and although math is important, in real life you usually don't need anything past high school in typical daily programming. Do the science first! I remember when I was young, I was attracted to the computer first whether it was programming to make it do things for me or just flat out gaming. It was later that math became interesting because I realized it gave me to tools to do what I wanted to do. If you try to make computers interesting by first burying them in complex and or difficult to understand math, I am almost certain you'll have the opposite effect.
I think the main problem with a head transplant is how do you reconnect all the nerves you've broken. They've found that broken nerves don't tend to reconnect. Nerves aren't exactly like wires, they're more like a living tree. If you chop down a tree but change your mind, you'll need to glue the tree together and hope that it grows back together. If it doesn't want to do that like as in nerves, that is not going to work.
Having your head disconnected from the body (even if you have all the blood vessels in place) is a problem. A lot of functions like breathing, heatbeat, and processing food is controlled by your brain and the lack of one isn't going to be great for the body.
The way Intel plans on using Optane memory, yes it will most certainly improve the speed of HDs by caching but to say it will always outperform an SSD is an outright lie. For starters if you're working with unusually large datasets it likely won't all fit in Optane memory and unless your cache is highly intelligent and can read ahead, it's likely that things will load slowly on the first attempt. Then for laptops there's also the bonus of not destroying the HD if your laptop gets bumped in the wrong way or treated with a bit of abuse when operating. If this worked so well then Seagate's hybrid SSD / HD drives should be almost everything but it isn't.
I think a good simple explanation is that to get higher and higher precision time measurements it takes more and more energy. At some point you're using too much energy in that it's having an effect on time itself. So there's probably some sort of limit on how far you can go.
If Google's lawsuit on theft of trade secrets and intellectual property and patent violations goes though, I suspect this will kill Uber's self-driving program. Last I recall Google was actually the farthest ahead on this "self-driving" technology and from the sounds of it the safest to rely on.
I'm not an engineer but I have worked with engineers and I do have a strong CS background as that's my education. I think something that you'll need to realize is that while it's possible to maybe train or teach someone a field that they never had any background in, it doesn't mean they'll ever be able to come close to someone who's worked on IT their entire lives. There's too many things that experience teaches you that you would never hope to know. So in reality, hire a specialist to help everyone or just accept the fact that your IT infrastructure is never going to be as good as it should be.