Why? That's what nukes are for. And if we ever reach the point of wanting to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of civilians, then wiping out their cities would probably be seen as a bonus, not a deterrent.
"Expert systems", as you indicated, is a far better term for what we have these days, but I think it just doesn't have that same media-friendly click-generating panache. Hell, I'm just thankful whenever the media calls it "AI" instead of the ridiculous over-broad term "robots" when they're just talking about computer algorithms.
The last BMW driver I noticed not only took up a handicap spot near my bank's ATM, but carefully straddled his car over both handicapped zones, so as to make sure one of those pesky handicapped peons wouldn't get too close to his car. In fairness, it was during off hours, so there was unlikely to be someone who needed it, but the thing that killed me was that the handicapped spots were actually no closer to the ATM than the normal spots, which were also open. For some people, I guess the world truly does revolve around themselves.
Still, I don't think this is exclusive to BMW or other luxury car drivers. I think it's just human nature to get even more annoyed when we see that it's not only an asshole, but a rich asshole, and we tend to remember those examples.
Commercial aircraft are different because they're carrying hundreds of people at a time, and any serious failure is likely to result in scattered, flaming wreckage and death on a massive scale, not to mention the loss of millions of dollars in aviation hardware. In other words, the stakes are much higher than for that of a personal passenger vehicle on the road.
Short of head-on collisions at freeway speeds or driving off a cliff, most vehicular accidents are quite survivable in modern airbag-equipped cars, especially if the computer is at least able to start braking ahead of time to some reasonable degree.
Whereas I loved the PS3 for exactly the same reason. Why do developers whine that their job is hard? If it was easy they'd get minimum-wage slaves to do it.
Not every programmer enjoys the same sort of challenges. There are always some devs who love getting as close to the metal as possible, doing crazy micro-optimizations to squeeze just a few more cycles from the hardware. It sounds like you're one of those guys.
Personally, I'd much rather be productive creating an actual game than farting around with (IMO) needlessly over-complex hardware - something Sony (up until the PS4) seemed to specialize in. There are no shortage of challenges beyond hardware-related issues, and every day spent trying to optimize the SPE code is a day you're NOT spending on implementing new game features.
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume what was meant was China's status as a "growing nation"... or rather, the transition from a 3rd world country into a 1st world powerhouse - economically, militarily, and socially. Although maybe I'm giving too much credit. Agreed, though... poorly worded.
So, basically, you just need someone to train the AI to understand your business requirements.
Anytime I hear someone use the word "just" in the context of solving a complex issue, it typically means they're hand-waving away a really hard problem.
Correct - I didn't mean to imply otherwise, if that's what it sounded like. The reason Xbox 360 fared better was because of it's symmetric three-core/six-thread configuration, which was much easier to program than the PS3's asymmetric single PPE + seven SPE configuration. But all the PPC-based chips had the same issue with the CPUs stalling quite a bit in normal gameplay code - there's really very little you can do about that as a developer, as you can only simplify or re-architect your code so much to help the CPU along.
The problem, of course, is that no one would pay any attention to the game if it wasn't a clone of a famous game like Metal Gear Solid.
Also, as it turns out, creating an original game design is surprisingly difficult. The only real way to determine if a game design idea will actually work is to try it out, which means you need a lot of art and code assets generated for a number of ideas you then decide to completely throw out. Most people never see the horrible, un-fun, utterly failed design attempts that occur early to midway through a game project. And even when the core of an idea is there, it typically requires a lot of iteration and tweaking before it really feels right. Copying a game lets you largely bypass this phase development, because you have a known destination for your code and design.
On some of the published games I've worked on that I'm most proud of, you can examine some of the design elements and realize how intuitive and natural they feel. But very early in the project, there was no guidelines or real understanding of how those mechanisms would work - occasionally even some naysayers about whether it would work at all. In hindsight, it looks completely obvious, as is often the case with elegant designs.
Unfortunately, while it had tremendous capability to run certain traditional HPC jobs, it wasn't that good a match for what game developers needed most...
Which is???
The cell broadband chip was originally designed to be used for multimedia processing. It had amazing vector processing capabilities, but videogame code doesn't have a lot of cases where you're crunching large amounts of data using simple algorithms, as with video decoding. As it turns out, typical game code tends to have lots of branches, special cases, one offs, etc (physics, AI, pathfinding, skeletal animation, etc). I imagine this is also why the major manufacturers returned to a more traditional x86-64 architecture instead of the PPC. The PowerPC had crappy out-of-order processing and branch prediction, and suffers rather badly when faced with branch-heavy code.
In other words, most videogames require processors that can deal efficiently with branching code and lots of small, irregular data sets via caching. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the cell is good at. There were some some devs who went through some fairly heroic efforts to squeeze all they could out of the cell, but in the end, all that effort netted about the same results as another couple of general-purpose CPU cores that took almost no coding effort. Most game developers I know disliked the PS3, because to get the same performance as on the Xbox 360 required about 10x the effort.
I'd have rather seen them make some effort at getting things turned around rather than putting it on a chopping block, but maybe it was beyond that point. I've been there, as part of a failing studio that went under. It's not fun at all, but competent devs should be able to get new jobs without trouble - experienced specialists are always in demand. So, you can say that I've got a bit of professional empathy for those guys.
There comes a point, however, when it's foolish to throw good money after bad, and it seems like that may be the case with Lionhead. I've been disappointed with them for many years now. The Fable franchise, while decent, has *never* lived up to what it really could have been, and this is from somewhat who absolutely loves all things RPG. For whatever reason, there was something at that studio that's been holding back the potential of those games. I've been in studios like that, and unfortunately, it's often not a problem with the general work force, but people in leadership positions that insists on meddling with game design and making bad decisions, sometimes obviously, but sometimes in fairly subtle ways. But it's pretty difficult to spot those things from the outside.
To give you one example: I was on a team with a project manager that had never worked in the game industry before, but he insisted on a number of really stupid design decisions, viewing them as "cost-saving measures", as they would tend to simplify development. His brilliant idea? All the enemies in the game would use the same basic attack code, and we'd just swap out art assets and tweak numbers to make them unique-looking. Naturally, the publisher realized the game played like shit, and we ended up having to completely redesign and rewrite that portion of the game. I was doing AI, so the re-designed forced a massive rewrite of my code, of course. As a result, the game ultimately ended up behind schedule and presumably over-budget, largely thanks to a bone-headed design decision from a non-game-designer put in charge of the game. The company was rife with stupid interference from above like this.
Sorry, I was a little unclear with the wording there. I actually mean "players" as in "companies in that market" rather than the physical devices themselves, also known as "players" (doh!). In other words, read it "where are all those companies now"? Many of them, like Creative Labs, have either evaporated or are a shell of their former selves. Sony, Samsung, HTC, and many other manufacturers are struggling.
And yes, "kicking the crap" is probably hyperbole - although I'm obviously talking about profitability here. Let's just say they're a "dominant factor" in a hugely lucrative and influential industry. Better?
Thanks for realizing those details weren't the focus of my underlying point, though.
It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on/. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?
Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...
Yep, I'm well aware of that history. There's a reason all modern fighter craft still carry guns, although apparently the F-35 will be able to only carry a fairly minimal amount of ammo, which some have taken issue with. But that's why I suggested that it's important to look at the actual data rather than making assumptions about what sort of engagements pilots are likely to encounter. To be honest, I have no idea what that data is, so I'm not trying to say one way or another. But it seems logical that you wouldn't want to sacrifice too many of your long or short range missiles for your guns if that's what you're using 99% of the time (hypothetically speaking) - it's still considered a weapon of last resort. A soldier keeps a knife or a pistol on him, but obviously reaches for his combat rifle first.
And just because technology doesn't solve all problems doesn't mean technology can't easily solve some problems. Communication of complex information, including surveillance, in real-time happens to be something that modern technology is pretty darn good at.
And with stealth aircraft that has only gotten worse, not better, as you now cannot turn on your own radar, for fear of being the first to give up your position. Which means that your own stealth leaves you relatively speaking more blind than before. Before you could light up your enemy, since they were already lighting you up. Now, not so much.
Is this as much a problem nowadays? I can't imagine a realistic scenario in which our combat aircraft are going to be without AWACS support in any sort of conflict in the foreseeable future. Any modern allied aircraft should be able to see whatever the allied sensor grid can see. Granted, there are many "lukewarm" conflicts in which you'll need to visually identify first, but why would we send piloted aircraft to do this these days? That's precisely what we should be using disposable drones for.
I'm not saying dogfighting and close-range combat aren't important, but you'd certainly want to look at recent history and determine probable engagement distances. I have no idea what it actually is (a quick Google search didn't turn up anything - that information may be classified). But I have to imagine - or at least I'd hope - that such data would drive future development. Although... given this boondoggle, maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
I'd guess they're doing this sort of research so they can learn more and either help to prove or disprove that particular theory. But unless the archaeological winds have changed while I wasn't paying attention, isn't that still the leading theory?
The funny thing about pithy little phrases like that is that there's inevitably a counter-phrase that works to refute it. In this case, perhaps "don't put all your eggs in one basket" would be appropriate?
There's nothing wrong with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as a general rule of thumb (nor of good uptime), but I'd certainly temper it with the notion that a lack of support or replacement parts can also be considered "broken", and thus in need of fixing. There's a lot of damage done by needless upgrades or "enhancements", which is what this phrase is meant to counter. I understand your frustration with idiots who view any one rule as some sort of golden rule handed down from on high, but... well, "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
I fail to see how an autonomous vehicle somehow means the surrender of our personal liberty. The government RIGHT NOW can deny you access to a license to drive. What changes when the car can now drive itself? If anything, it seems like autonomous vehicles will allow even greater personal freedom and autonomy, because at some point these systems will be so effective that non-licensed passengers will be able to use these vehicles as well. Besides, for the foreseeable future, people will still be able to drive vehicles manually. If nothing else, vintage or enthusiast cars will probably always be with us.
Also, I don't think the goal of eliminating a large percentage of 30K needless US deaths per year (with many more maimed or injured) due to traffic accidents is a "soccer mom mentality".
Once autonomous vehicles are on the road in significant numbers, we'll be able to see what the accident rates are. If they're a couple of orders of magnitude safer than manually-driven vehicles as I suspect they may be, we could see a significant push to remove non-autonomous vehicles from the road simply for safety reasons. But don't kid yourself - this is going to be a decades-long process. Also, the number of commercially available self-driving cars are still zero as of today, so let's not jump the gun there, no pun intended.
What I think will happen is that you'll eventually need a specialist license to drive vintage / older cars, and it will be a bit tougher to get and keep than it is today. Most people will not bother with it, preferring the convenience of the AI-driven vehicles. And people who drive recklessly or speed too much will lose their manual license much more easily than they do today.
True. Thank goodness we'll be getting a chauffeur that can literally see in all directions at the same time using vision, lidar, and radar, who's attention never wavers, and can react to unexpected events about 1000x faster than a human. And oddly enough, you don't really need to be all that intelligent to drive a car... just very specialized.
Remember that value depends on perception. The only value game discs have for me is entertainment value, and that value is actually enhanced when I have immediate access to the game rather than having to hunt down a disc I've forgotten I even own.
Naturally, MS and game publishers would certainly love to kill physical media, not because it has real world value, but the secondary effects of that - the used game market. Digital goods are a bit unlike physical goods in that there's no real penalty for owning a used copy. It's 100% identical to the brand new copy, and won't ever degrade, making the used market a *very* long tail that tends to eat into the long tail of game sales. Digital downloads sold to an individual user are the answer to that, of course.
Eventually the sheer convenience of digital downloads will make physical media obsolete. I think that will make a lot of people sad, but I'm not sure I'll be one of them, so long as we have some real competition in the gaming market to keep companies from turning into complete overlord-style asshats, which is otherwise near inevitable. Ultimately, that's our best trump card - the simple fact that we can take our entertainment dollars elsewhere if we choose.
The key phrase is "once they reach critical acceptance". I realistically interpret this as "never". At the moment, they're not exactly making a lot of progress replacing traditional desktop apps, and they've got almost no presence at all in mobile.
No, Microsoft will not be killing the Win32 API, even if some in the company would like to. They'd kill one of their core constituency, which is businesses, obsoleting all the millions of legacy applications that run only on Windows which, realistically speaking, will *never* be ported. The idea that the desktop is going away anytime in the foreseeable future is a fantasy. If Microsoft is stupid enough to force people's hands to switch to a non-compatible platform, why wouldn't people then just switch to platform-neutral models like web apps, or even choose a non-MS platform?
Windows most significant advantage is its incredibly vast application ecosystem and robust backward compatibility. They want to keep people on their platforms, not drive them away in some mad power grab on a platform that's already shrinking in general significance.
I was surprised at this as well. Do you know who apparently still like physical disks? Kids. They enjoy being able to lug their games over to a friend's house, throw it in their game console, and start playing. Personally, I've gone 100% digital. The idea of never having to touch another disk to launch a game is a joy, but not everyone cares.
That being said, part of the furor was the notion that MS is forcing you to check in with them once a day or your games simply don't work. That's pretty draconian. Losing the secondary used game market was also deemed unacceptable. Yes, it was a bit of an overreaction, but MS brought in on themselves by their "fuck you, peon, you'll like what we tell you to like" attitude, and the general impression that they were ignoring their core constituency: hardcore gamers. Plus, toss in the ridiculous forced inclusion of the Kinnect device, bumping up the price for a moderately inferior console, and it's not hard to see why the Xbox had a PR disaster early in it's lifecycle, and is likely paying the price even now.
You're correct that there's more of a distinction between proper Computer Science and a career as a programmer, even though many professional programmers have CS degrees. Math is much more a part of CS than it is as a part of my day as a working programmer. I should probably have made that more clear.
Again, though, people keep bring up things you do with programming languages rather than programming itself. And again, I'm not saying that math isn't useful, but at it's core, there's very little math in the task of programming itself - that just happens to be one of the many things that general-purpose programming languages let you do.
Robotics programming is a particular application domain that obviously requires advanced math skills, similar to videogame programming. If you're writing an accounting software package, it obviously requires advanced knowledge of accounting rules. It makes no more sense to say that programming requires advanced accounting knowledge. Math just happens to be useful for a LOT of different applications - engineering, graphics, videogames, scientific fields, etc, etc. That doesn't mean it's a prerequisite for ALL programming.
Oh, and "just flashing lights on the screen?" "Reinstalling Windows all day?" Really?
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Why? That's what nukes are for. And if we ever reach the point of wanting to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of civilians, then wiping out their cities would probably be seen as a bonus, not a deterrent.
"Expert systems", as you indicated, is a far better term for what we have these days, but I think it just doesn't have that same media-friendly click-generating panache. Hell, I'm just thankful whenever the media calls it "AI" instead of the ridiculous over-broad term "robots" when they're just talking about computer algorithms.
The last BMW driver I noticed not only took up a handicap spot near my bank's ATM, but carefully straddled his car over both handicapped zones, so as to make sure one of those pesky handicapped peons wouldn't get too close to his car. In fairness, it was during off hours, so there was unlikely to be someone who needed it, but the thing that killed me was that the handicapped spots were actually no closer to the ATM than the normal spots, which were also open. For some people, I guess the world truly does revolve around themselves.
Still, I don't think this is exclusive to BMW or other luxury car drivers. I think it's just human nature to get even more annoyed when we see that it's not only an asshole, but a rich asshole, and we tend to remember those examples.
Commercial aircraft are different because they're carrying hundreds of people at a time, and any serious failure is likely to result in scattered, flaming wreckage and death on a massive scale, not to mention the loss of millions of dollars in aviation hardware. In other words, the stakes are much higher than for that of a personal passenger vehicle on the road.
Short of head-on collisions at freeway speeds or driving off a cliff, most vehicular accidents are quite survivable in modern airbag-equipped cars, especially if the computer is at least able to start braking ahead of time to some reasonable degree.
Whereas I loved the PS3 for exactly the same reason. Why do developers whine that their job is hard? If it was easy they'd get minimum-wage slaves to do it.
Not every programmer enjoys the same sort of challenges. There are always some devs who love getting as close to the metal as possible, doing crazy micro-optimizations to squeeze just a few more cycles from the hardware. It sounds like you're one of those guys.
Personally, I'd much rather be productive creating an actual game than farting around with (IMO) needlessly over-complex hardware - something Sony (up until the PS4) seemed to specialize in. There are no shortage of challenges beyond hardware-related issues, and every day spent trying to optimize the SPE code is a day you're NOT spending on implementing new game features.
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume what was meant was China's status as a "growing nation"... or rather, the transition from a 3rd world country into a 1st world powerhouse - economically, militarily, and socially. Although maybe I'm giving too much credit. Agreed, though... poorly worded.
So, basically, you just need someone to train the AI to understand your business requirements.
Anytime I hear someone use the word "just" in the context of solving a complex issue, it typically means they're hand-waving away a really hard problem.
Correct - I didn't mean to imply otherwise, if that's what it sounded like. The reason Xbox 360 fared better was because of it's symmetric three-core/six-thread configuration, which was much easier to program than the PS3's asymmetric single PPE + seven SPE configuration. But all the PPC-based chips had the same issue with the CPUs stalling quite a bit in normal gameplay code - there's really very little you can do about that as a developer, as you can only simplify or re-architect your code so much to help the CPU along.
The problem, of course, is that no one would pay any attention to the game if it wasn't a clone of a famous game like Metal Gear Solid.
Also, as it turns out, creating an original game design is surprisingly difficult. The only real way to determine if a game design idea will actually work is to try it out, which means you need a lot of art and code assets generated for a number of ideas you then decide to completely throw out. Most people never see the horrible, un-fun, utterly failed design attempts that occur early to midway through a game project. And even when the core of an idea is there, it typically requires a lot of iteration and tweaking before it really feels right. Copying a game lets you largely bypass this phase development, because you have a known destination for your code and design.
On some of the published games I've worked on that I'm most proud of, you can examine some of the design elements and realize how intuitive and natural they feel. But very early in the project, there was no guidelines or real understanding of how those mechanisms would work - occasionally even some naysayers about whether it would work at all. In hindsight, it looks completely obvious, as is often the case with elegant designs.
Unfortunately, while it had tremendous capability to run certain traditional HPC jobs, it wasn't that good a match for what game developers needed most...
Which is???
The cell broadband chip was originally designed to be used for multimedia processing. It had amazing vector processing capabilities, but videogame code doesn't have a lot of cases where you're crunching large amounts of data using simple algorithms, as with video decoding. As it turns out, typical game code tends to have lots of branches, special cases, one offs, etc (physics, AI, pathfinding, skeletal animation, etc). I imagine this is also why the major manufacturers returned to a more traditional x86-64 architecture instead of the PPC. The PowerPC had crappy out-of-order processing and branch prediction, and suffers rather badly when faced with branch-heavy code.
In other words, most videogames require processors that can deal efficiently with branching code and lots of small, irregular data sets via caching. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what the cell is good at. There were some some devs who went through some fairly heroic efforts to squeeze all they could out of the cell, but in the end, all that effort netted about the same results as another couple of general-purpose CPU cores that took almost no coding effort. Most game developers I know disliked the PS3, because to get the same performance as on the Xbox 360 required about 10x the effort.
I'd have rather seen them make some effort at getting things turned around rather than putting it on a chopping block, but maybe it was beyond that point. I've been there, as part of a failing studio that went under. It's not fun at all, but competent devs should be able to get new jobs without trouble - experienced specialists are always in demand. So, you can say that I've got a bit of professional empathy for those guys.
There comes a point, however, when it's foolish to throw good money after bad, and it seems like that may be the case with Lionhead. I've been disappointed with them for many years now. The Fable franchise, while decent, has *never* lived up to what it really could have been, and this is from somewhat who absolutely loves all things RPG. For whatever reason, there was something at that studio that's been holding back the potential of those games. I've been in studios like that, and unfortunately, it's often not a problem with the general work force, but people in leadership positions that insists on meddling with game design and making bad decisions, sometimes obviously, but sometimes in fairly subtle ways. But it's pretty difficult to spot those things from the outside.
To give you one example: I was on a team with a project manager that had never worked in the game industry before, but he insisted on a number of really stupid design decisions, viewing them as "cost-saving measures", as they would tend to simplify development. His brilliant idea? All the enemies in the game would use the same basic attack code, and we'd just swap out art assets and tweak numbers to make them unique-looking. Naturally, the publisher realized the game played like shit, and we ended up having to completely redesign and rewrite that portion of the game. I was doing AI, so the re-designed forced a massive rewrite of my code, of course. As a result, the game ultimately ended up behind schedule and presumably over-budget, largely thanks to a bone-headed design decision from a non-game-designer put in charge of the game. The company was rife with stupid interference from above like this.
Sorry, I was a little unclear with the wording there. I actually mean "players" as in "companies in that market" rather than the physical devices themselves, also known as "players" (doh!). In other words, read it "where are all those companies now"? Many of them, like Creative Labs, have either evaporated or are a shell of their former selves. Sony, Samsung, HTC, and many other manufacturers are struggling.
And yes, "kicking the crap" is probably hyperbole - although I'm obviously talking about profitability here. Let's just say they're a "dominant factor" in a hugely lucrative and influential industry. Better?
Thanks for realizing those details weren't the focus of my underlying point, though.
It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on /. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?
Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...
Yep, I'm well aware of that history. There's a reason all modern fighter craft still carry guns, although apparently the F-35 will be able to only carry a fairly minimal amount of ammo, which some have taken issue with. But that's why I suggested that it's important to look at the actual data rather than making assumptions about what sort of engagements pilots are likely to encounter. To be honest, I have no idea what that data is, so I'm not trying to say one way or another. But it seems logical that you wouldn't want to sacrifice too many of your long or short range missiles for your guns if that's what you're using 99% of the time (hypothetically speaking) - it's still considered a weapon of last resort. A soldier keeps a knife or a pistol on him, but obviously reaches for his combat rifle first.
And just because technology doesn't solve all problems doesn't mean technology can't easily solve some problems. Communication of complex information, including surveillance, in real-time happens to be something that modern technology is pretty darn good at.
And with stealth aircraft that has only gotten worse, not better, as you now cannot turn on your own radar, for fear of being the first to give up your position. Which means that your own stealth leaves you relatively speaking more blind than before. Before you could light up your enemy, since they were already lighting you up. Now, not so much.
Is this as much a problem nowadays? I can't imagine a realistic scenario in which our combat aircraft are going to be without AWACS support in any sort of conflict in the foreseeable future. Any modern allied aircraft should be able to see whatever the allied sensor grid can see. Granted, there are many "lukewarm" conflicts in which you'll need to visually identify first, but why would we send piloted aircraft to do this these days? That's precisely what we should be using disposable drones for.
I'm not saying dogfighting and close-range combat aren't important, but you'd certainly want to look at recent history and determine probable engagement distances. I have no idea what it actually is (a quick Google search didn't turn up anything - that information may be classified). But I have to imagine - or at least I'd hope - that such data would drive future development. Although... given this boondoggle, maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
I'd guess they're doing this sort of research so they can learn more and either help to prove or disprove that particular theory. But unless the archaeological winds have changed while I wasn't paying attention, isn't that still the leading theory?
The funny thing about pithy little phrases like that is that there's inevitably a counter-phrase that works to refute it. In this case, perhaps "don't put all your eggs in one basket" would be appropriate?
There's nothing wrong with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as a general rule of thumb (nor of good uptime), but I'd certainly temper it with the notion that a lack of support or replacement parts can also be considered "broken", and thus in need of fixing. There's a lot of damage done by needless upgrades or "enhancements", which is what this phrase is meant to counter. I understand your frustration with idiots who view any one rule as some sort of golden rule handed down from on high, but... well, "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
I fail to see how an autonomous vehicle somehow means the surrender of our personal liberty. The government RIGHT NOW can deny you access to a license to drive. What changes when the car can now drive itself? If anything, it seems like autonomous vehicles will allow even greater personal freedom and autonomy, because at some point these systems will be so effective that non-licensed passengers will be able to use these vehicles as well. Besides, for the foreseeable future, people will still be able to drive vehicles manually. If nothing else, vintage or enthusiast cars will probably always be with us.
Also, I don't think the goal of eliminating a large percentage of 30K needless US deaths per year (with many more maimed or injured) due to traffic accidents is a "soccer mom mentality".
Once autonomous vehicles are on the road in significant numbers, we'll be able to see what the accident rates are. If they're a couple of orders of magnitude safer than manually-driven vehicles as I suspect they may be, we could see a significant push to remove non-autonomous vehicles from the road simply for safety reasons. But don't kid yourself - this is going to be a decades-long process. Also, the number of commercially available self-driving cars are still zero as of today, so let's not jump the gun there, no pun intended.
What I think will happen is that you'll eventually need a specialist license to drive vintage / older cars, and it will be a bit tougher to get and keep than it is today. Most people will not bother with it, preferring the convenience of the AI-driven vehicles. And people who drive recklessly or speed too much will lose their manual license much more easily than they do today.
True. Thank goodness we'll be getting a chauffeur that can literally see in all directions at the same time using vision, lidar, and radar, who's attention never wavers, and can react to unexpected events about 1000x faster than a human. And oddly enough, you don't really need to be all that intelligent to drive a car... just very specialized.
Remember that value depends on perception. The only value game discs have for me is entertainment value, and that value is actually enhanced when I have immediate access to the game rather than having to hunt down a disc I've forgotten I even own.
Naturally, MS and game publishers would certainly love to kill physical media, not because it has real world value, but the secondary effects of that - the used game market. Digital goods are a bit unlike physical goods in that there's no real penalty for owning a used copy. It's 100% identical to the brand new copy, and won't ever degrade, making the used market a *very* long tail that tends to eat into the long tail of game sales. Digital downloads sold to an individual user are the answer to that, of course.
Eventually the sheer convenience of digital downloads will make physical media obsolete. I think that will make a lot of people sad, but I'm not sure I'll be one of them, so long as we have some real competition in the gaming market to keep companies from turning into complete overlord-style asshats, which is otherwise near inevitable. Ultimately, that's our best trump card - the simple fact that we can take our entertainment dollars elsewhere if we choose.
The key phrase is "once they reach critical acceptance". I realistically interpret this as "never". At the moment, they're not exactly making a lot of progress replacing traditional desktop apps, and they've got almost no presence at all in mobile.
No, Microsoft will not be killing the Win32 API, even if some in the company would like to. They'd kill one of their core constituency, which is businesses, obsoleting all the millions of legacy applications that run only on Windows which, realistically speaking, will *never* be ported. The idea that the desktop is going away anytime in the foreseeable future is a fantasy. If Microsoft is stupid enough to force people's hands to switch to a non-compatible platform, why wouldn't people then just switch to platform-neutral models like web apps, or even choose a non-MS platform?
Windows most significant advantage is its incredibly vast application ecosystem and robust backward compatibility. They want to keep people on their platforms, not drive them away in some mad power grab on a platform that's already shrinking in general significance.
I was surprised at this as well. Do you know who apparently still like physical disks? Kids. They enjoy being able to lug their games over to a friend's house, throw it in their game console, and start playing. Personally, I've gone 100% digital. The idea of never having to touch another disk to launch a game is a joy, but not everyone cares.
That being said, part of the furor was the notion that MS is forcing you to check in with them once a day or your games simply don't work. That's pretty draconian. Losing the secondary used game market was also deemed unacceptable. Yes, it was a bit of an overreaction, but MS brought in on themselves by their "fuck you, peon, you'll like what we tell you to like" attitude, and the general impression that they were ignoring their core constituency: hardcore gamers. Plus, toss in the ridiculous forced inclusion of the Kinnect device, bumping up the price for a moderately inferior console, and it's not hard to see why the Xbox had a PR disaster early in it's lifecycle, and is likely paying the price even now.
You're correct that there's more of a distinction between proper Computer Science and a career as a programmer, even though many professional programmers have CS degrees. Math is much more a part of CS than it is as a part of my day as a working programmer. I should probably have made that more clear.
Again, though, people keep bring up things you do with programming languages rather than programming itself. And again, I'm not saying that math isn't useful, but at it's core, there's very little math in the task of programming itself - that just happens to be one of the many things that general-purpose programming languages let you do.
Robotics programming is a particular application domain that obviously requires advanced math skills, similar to videogame programming. If you're writing an accounting software package, it obviously requires advanced knowledge of accounting rules. It makes no more sense to say that programming requires advanced accounting knowledge. Math just happens to be useful for a LOT of different applications - engineering, graphics, videogames, scientific fields, etc, etc. That doesn't mean it's a prerequisite for ALL programming.
Oh, and "just flashing lights on the screen?" "Reinstalling Windows all day?" Really?