Any activity based on self-interest will always be predatory unless operating in a vacuum. Given this, it follows that any business that wants to make money will do so on the backs of its employees and at the expense of its competitors. The illusion of symbiosis and mutual benefit that accompanies 'gainful employment' is just that - an illusion. If you're lucky, that illusion may be so comfortable that you become a willing participant (and aggressively so) as long as you can pay your bills, buy a home and retire to some place warm.
'Sharp business' is predatory behavior taken to the extreme, bound only by the laws of the state. If the boundaries of law are pushed back or violated by the skilled application of knowledge (read corporate lawyering), business becomes 'sharper' and the magnitude of predation becomes larger. But predation is not self-sustaining (doesn't operate in a vacuum, remember?), so something has to give. Enron, anyone?
Enough of all this pontification - my point is that attempting to see past the illusion will make your head explode. This is what it means to live in human society at this point in time, so deal with it.
My $0.02:
The notion of intelligence is hard to pin down, but it all seems to be just a matter of degree. A five year old child may be intelligent, but a two day old infant definitely is not. A college student can be said to be more intelligent than a kid in preschool, but in what sense? Simple - in the sense that matters to whoever is making the evaluation of intelligence. A software system that can recognize faces 90% of the time is clearly intelligent to anybody that cares that it can even do such a thing. A dog that can do the exact same thing is equally intelligent, only naturally instead of artificially.
Sentience, on the other hand, is a purely subjective matter and is entirely separate from the notion of self-awareness. We know we are sentient because every other human is (a circular argument, I know). Nobody gives a rat's ass if anyone else is self-aware. A high-school dropout is no less sentient in the human sense than a Nobel laureate, though it is clear that the laureate is more intelligent in the academic and intellectual sense. What we consider sentience would probably be laughable to a higher-order being in the same way we would consider the sentience of a cockroach to be nothing of the sort. Yet cockroaches do act intelligently. They will find and eat your food and generally carry on with a semblance of purpose while the foul up your kitchen.
The goal of current artificial intelligence research seems to be to create intelligent systems that credibly mimic human-level sentience. Currently, graduate students are busy building intelligent systems that mimic cockroach-level sentience - maybe not even that because I'm yet to see a robot that's behaviorally indistinguishable from a cockroach (let alone a dog). Star Trek's Data (the Holy Grail of AI) is considered sentient, though he is clearly an intelligent system that credibly mimics human-level sentience. None of his friends on the ship cares whether he is truly sentient in the human sense or whether he is truly self-aware. All that matters is that he appears to be.
Of course creating a Data-like intelligent system is incredibly difficult if at all possible, which is why Star Trek is set several centuries in the future. Rodenberry was careful not to repeat Clarke's serious gaffe of putting the promise of advanced god-like technology (i.e. HAL in '2001:A Space Odyssey') within reach of the dreamers who actually believe such stuff will be possible in their own lifetimes.
We already have systems that are artificially intelligent ('weak AI')in the ways that matter to those create, use and play with them e.g. speech recognition software that makes computers accessible to those without the use of their hands. Artificially sentient systems ('strong AI') like Data are still way, way off in the future. So let's get crackin'.
I can tell you right now - I saw the subtitled version on DVD (don't ask me where or how) - the animation style is pretty lavish and the storyline is pretty strong until the last 20 minutes, where the fairy tale-ish ending was so sappy and weak compared to what had preceded it that I haven't bother watching it since. Probably seems sappy and weak due to the massive culture gap - I suppose us gaijin will always be gaijin...
... programming is all about generating code. The necessity and depth of documentation is determined by the context - if you're working as part of a development team, you will be strongly concerned about maintainability and reasonable code documentation will be necessary. If you're hacking together a bunch of assembly-optimized modules, then you might want to attach a minimalistic blurb to your routines, but nothing as comprehensive as most coding standards require. In the end, code documentation is all about maintainability and minimizing the 'discovery' curve for future work on your code.
What is of paramount importance is documenting your design, which is where any engineer expends 90% of their energy. Design work is what separates an engineer from a programmer; indeed, the ability to design complex software systems is what stratifies the field of software development into it's levels: CTO, architect, engineer, programmer, etc. Design work is where your college student loan payments are justified, since it really does take an advanced degree to design certain classes of systems. Implementation just requires programmming drones, but some sort of design document must exist to guide their efforts.
The point here is this: code documentation is to be encouraged, and lexical programming is a good way to do it. But the significance of that pales in comparison to that of properly documenting your design.
Sure, RedHat may not make much releasing its distro for free and charging a pittance for tech support - but consider this: if their distro becomes pervasive and acquires a quality track record, it will come to a point where they'll be able to charge corporate clients pretty much anything for custom engineering work and consulting services, which have very high profit margins. RedHat has put together a team of very smart people to make sure that this happens...
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In Soviet Russia, penis enlarges you!
Any activity based on self-interest will always be predatory unless operating in a vacuum. Given this, it follows that any business that wants to make money will do so on the backs of its employees and at the expense of its competitors. The illusion of symbiosis and mutual benefit that accompanies 'gainful employment' is just that - an illusion. If you're lucky, that illusion may be so comfortable that you become a willing participant (and aggressively so) as long as you can pay your bills, buy a home and retire to some place warm.
'Sharp business' is predatory behavior taken to the extreme, bound only by the laws of the state. If the boundaries of law are pushed back or violated by the skilled application of knowledge (read corporate lawyering), business becomes 'sharper' and the magnitude of predation becomes larger. But predation is not self-sustaining (doesn't operate in a vacuum, remember?), so something has to give. Enron, anyone?
Enough of all this pontification - my point is that attempting to see past the illusion will make your head explode. This is what it means to live in human society at this point in time, so deal with it.
My $0.02: The notion of intelligence is hard to pin down, but it all seems to be just a matter of degree. A five year old child may be intelligent, but a two day old infant definitely is not. A college student can be said to be more intelligent than a kid in preschool, but in what sense? Simple - in the sense that matters to whoever is making the evaluation of intelligence. A software system that can recognize faces 90% of the time is clearly intelligent to anybody that cares that it can even do such a thing. A dog that can do the exact same thing is equally intelligent, only naturally instead of artificially. Sentience, on the other hand, is a purely subjective matter and is entirely separate from the notion of self-awareness. We know we are sentient because every other human is (a circular argument, I know). Nobody gives a rat's ass if anyone else is self-aware. A high-school dropout is no less sentient in the human sense than a Nobel laureate, though it is clear that the laureate is more intelligent in the academic and intellectual sense. What we consider sentience would probably be laughable to a higher-order being in the same way we would consider the sentience of a cockroach to be nothing of the sort. Yet cockroaches do act intelligently. They will find and eat your food and generally carry on with a semblance of purpose while the foul up your kitchen. The goal of current artificial intelligence research seems to be to create intelligent systems that credibly mimic human-level sentience. Currently, graduate students are busy building intelligent systems that mimic cockroach-level sentience - maybe not even that because I'm yet to see a robot that's behaviorally indistinguishable from a cockroach (let alone a dog). Star Trek's Data (the Holy Grail of AI) is considered sentient, though he is clearly an intelligent system that credibly mimics human-level sentience. None of his friends on the ship cares whether he is truly sentient in the human sense or whether he is truly self-aware. All that matters is that he appears to be. Of course creating a Data-like intelligent system is incredibly difficult if at all possible, which is why Star Trek is set several centuries in the future. Rodenberry was careful not to repeat Clarke's serious gaffe of putting the promise of advanced god-like technology (i.e. HAL in '2001:A Space Odyssey') within reach of the dreamers who actually believe such stuff will be possible in their own lifetimes. We already have systems that are artificially intelligent ('weak AI')in the ways that matter to those create, use and play with them e.g. speech recognition software that makes computers accessible to those without the use of their hands. Artificially sentient systems ('strong AI') like Data are still way, way off in the future. So let's get crackin'.
I can tell you right now - I saw the subtitled version on DVD (don't ask me where or how) - the animation style is pretty lavish and the storyline is pretty strong until the last 20 minutes, where the fairy tale-ish ending was so sappy and weak compared to what had preceded it that I haven't bother watching it since. Probably seems sappy and weak due to the massive culture gap - I suppose us gaijin will always be gaijin ...
... programming is all about generating code. The necessity and depth of documentation is determined by the context - if you're working as part of a development team, you will be strongly concerned about maintainability and reasonable code documentation will be necessary. If you're hacking together a bunch of assembly-optimized modules, then you might want to attach a minimalistic blurb to your routines, but nothing as comprehensive as most coding standards require. In the end, code documentation is all about maintainability and minimizing the 'discovery' curve for future work on your code.
What is of paramount importance is documenting your design, which is where any engineer expends 90% of their energy. Design work is what separates an engineer from a programmer; indeed, the ability to design complex software systems is what stratifies the field of software development into it's levels: CTO, architect, engineer, programmer, etc. Design work is where your college student loan payments are justified, since it really does take an advanced degree to design certain classes of systems. Implementation just requires programmming drones, but some sort of design document must exist to guide their efforts. The point here is this: code documentation is to be encouraged, and lexical programming is a good way to do it. But the significance of that pales in comparison to that of properly documenting your design.
Sure, RedHat may not make much releasing its distro for free and charging a pittance for tech support - but consider this: if their distro becomes pervasive and acquires a quality track record, it will come to a point where they'll be able to charge corporate clients pretty much anything for custom engineering work and consulting services, which have very high profit margins. RedHat has put together a team of very smart people to make sure that this happens ...
Your vagina or your mind?
That's exactly right.