...wouldn't it be possible to create a slave-class of creature, with many of the abilities of humans but none of the rights? I believe this is inevitable. If it's not done in the USA, it will be done in China.
how ethical is it to create something potentially intelligent, and then have it suffer in a lab all its life? Like graduate students? You may have a point there.:)
I really wonder if you understand ethics at all? I emphatically do not. On drill-down, all axiological premises seem to be unprovable mush. I can understand pain vs. nonpain and pleasure vs nonpleasure, but that's about as far as it goes. To be intellectually honest, I have no idea what "good" is. "Good" for the steak eater, is not "good" for the steak contributor. Emperically, "good" always seems to boil down to, "I like it" times the number of people voting, and is always viewpoint dependent.
So we mix some code together and it's what? Not what nature intended? Who give a rat's patoot? Are we playing [insert favorite diety here]? Again, so what?
I'm just having some trouble with the ethical implications. WHAT ethical implications? How is a hybrid any more good or evil than a naturally occurring organism? Help me out here guys, and no offense, but if you can't make an argument without reference to diefic entity nonsense, I'm not interested (unless of course, it's really, really funny).
which is a little different from being the most modern coder. I code in.net mostly, either vb or C#. After a while, you start seeing repetitive problems (It sounds cooler if you call them "patterns" even though the term adds almost nothing semantically). After a while, you can write a class with a function to append an array to an array either horizontally or vertically in your sleep.
But you don't. You have them all pre-written after a while, which is why it seems to management that you're not working as hard. You just solve the problem and go home without noise or drama.
...when the American electorate decided to go with the pleasant movie fantasies of a has-been B actor in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease instead of the unpleasant energy and economic realities explained quite plainly by an engineer who happened to be president at the time. Yes, America broke with reality 30 years ago, which is more or less the definition of psychosis.
Any hope we had of energy independence and a stable economy died then. Arab oil and economic decay through debt spending were in. Whoopee! And hasn't that worked out well?
All your apps will become legacy and have to be recoded or entirely rewritten in their new Windows Tiered Foundation (WTF) framework to run on the new system, because God forbid that Microsoft should provide a decent upgrade path from.net.
any project that isn't "How can I write something to sell more useless crap and make some business more money." Software can be like a miraculous tool. The fact that it's used mostly as a way to sell widgets to wankers on the web somewhere nauseates me daily. Microsoft is notably awful in this regard. If you're creating medical or engineering software, you don't exist for them. Not enough money.
You mean tiny rectangular rooms with controlled environments where the subjects feed at regular intervals and are trained to press buttons to receive tiny rewards.
Whoops! Gotta go type up that report or I won't get that bonus or that bigger cubicle down the hall.
While its true that nuclear power is the only immediately scalable power source we have that can fill in for coal and gas powered electrical generation at anything like the current scale, there are a number of problems this doesn't even begin to solve.
One of the biggest is transportation technology and battery technology. The energy crisis coming from oil depletion over the next few decades would be little more than an inconvenience if the world's transportation systems were run on electricity instead of petroleum. Right now, batteries still don't have enough energy density at a price point that makes them worth using. At the moment, we're dependent on oil for so much that even our coal and nuclear plants couldn't operate without it (Remember Fukashima's Diesel back-up generators?). Similarly, coal and nuclear fuel travel on oil, are mined using petroleum based machines, transported on diesel oil trains, and so on.
So, in a nutshell, the problem is one of over dependence on ONE kind of fuel (i.e. oil) at the expense of all others for ONE service (i.e. transportation).
Changing this configuration is distinctly non-trivial, and frankly, we as a civilization dependent on money, cheap and available oil, and a just-in-time supply chain may be out of time to fix it. At least not quickly enough to avoid having a goodish number of the world's inhabitants die of starvation.
Reports have started to trickle in from outlying areas stating that "The turtle stands on its own back." The turtle, in an exclusive interview with our reporters, refused to confirm or deny this, stating that it was a "personal" matter and that his first obligation was to shield his family of child universes from embarrassment.
Gen-ED is about WHY you're programming something in the first place. CS courses are about HOW to program. The HOW always follows from the WHY.
You can't be a good programmer without understanding what a program (or any other machine) is for. ALL Technology (including software) ONLY exists to serve humans in all their varied social, economic, political, philosophical and psychological contexts. It is a tool. Nothing more. To be a good toolmaker, you need to understand that a financial planner has very different needs, desires and skills compared to a building engineer, or a consumer sentiment analyst or a teacher, or a writer. They all eat too, but what, why and how they eat, and for what purposes other than nutrition vary wildly. It's the same with software.
Drug laws have always been used as a quick method of imprisoning undesirables like black people, poor people, Hispanics, and people who break their eggs a the small end. While we now have much more sophisticated methods (e.g. the patriot act), drug laws still give law enforcement a tool\excuse to keep down those annoying [Fill in the blank] people. While our "leadership" won't want to give that up, imprisonment is expensive, and pot keeps the [Fill in the blank] people passive, so there's at least a better chance of decriminalization than there used to be.
Quite so. To be more accurate, make coding look like an activity that makes as much as lawyering or doctoring or any other profession where Johny isn't competing with a $5/hr labor pool in a $50/hr price environment, and Johny will start taking coding seriously as a career.
In the meantime all the corporate and political blather about education and training is just posturing and feel-good sound bites. Makes a decent marketing tool.
Currently, the USA has a tax and legal structure that does not make outsourcing at all difficult. If we weren't forced into a frothing ideological debates over socialism vs. capitalism every time the conversation starts, we could probably find a way to make it more attractive to in-source than outsource.
1) Microsoft has obviously decided to exit the software language tool and production business. The income generated from it barely amounts to a rounding error on their bottom line.
2) Microsoft doesn't give a crap about developers and their intellectual investment in any technology. India has lots of developers. They're disposable. Bill's trying to get potential future developers in Africa healthier and better educated as we speak. It ensures a constant pool of cheap labor.
3) Microsoft makes its money through its OS, Office, business service and game platforms, so unless you're a large organization selling widgets/services/games to wankers on the web, or servicing the software of those who do, you're irrelevant to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
...professionalism, responsibility, and minimizing damage
All of which rests on some set of unprovable axiological premises.
Consider the fact that your rights end where they infringe on another person's. ...I haven't actually managed to kill anyone yet
Give me a measurable, quantifiable, provable definition of "rights" and I might take you seriously.
So, you don't buy or wear clothes in an industrialized country?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour#Present_day
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Homelessworld/message/22807
...wouldn't it be possible to create a slave-class of creature, with many of the abilities of humans but none of the rights?
I believe this is inevitable. If it's not done in the USA, it will be done in China.
how ethical is it to create something potentially intelligent, and then have it suffer in a lab all its life? :)
Like graduate students? You may have a point there.
I really wonder if you understand ethics at all?
I emphatically do not. On drill-down, all axiological premises seem to be unprovable mush. I can understand pain vs. nonpain and pleasure vs nonpleasure, but that's about as far as it goes. To be intellectually honest, I have no idea what "good" is. "Good" for the steak eater, is not "good" for the steak contributor. Emperically, "good" always seems to boil down to, "I like it" times the number of people voting, and is always viewpoint dependent.
So we mix some code together and it's what? Not what nature intended? Who give a rat's patoot? Are we playing [insert favorite diety here]? Again, so what?
I'm just having some trouble with the ethical implications. WHAT ethical implications? How is a hybrid any more good or evil than a naturally occurring organism? Help me out here guys, and no offense, but if you can't make an argument without reference to diefic entity nonsense, I'm not interested (unless of course, it's really, really funny).
to see what might have been?
which is a little different from being the most modern coder. I code in .net mostly, either vb or C#. After a while, you start seeing repetitive problems (It sounds cooler if you call them "patterns" even though the term adds almost nothing semantically). After a while, you can write a class with a function to append an array to an array either horizontally or vertically in your sleep.
But you don't. You have them all pre-written after a while, which is why it seems to management that you're not working as hard. You just solve the problem and go home without noise or drama.
I did take it, but it was the frikkin' *red* pill. Dang it. Things just haven't been much good since then.
...when the American electorate decided to go with the pleasant movie fantasies of a has-been B actor in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease instead of the unpleasant energy and economic realities explained quite plainly by an engineer who happened to be president at the time. Yes, America broke with reality 30 years ago, which is more or less the definition of psychosis.
Any hope we had of energy independence and a stable economy died then. Arab oil and economic decay through debt spending were in. Whoopee! And hasn't that worked out well?
All your apps will become legacy and have to be recoded or entirely rewritten in their new Windows Tiered Foundation (WTF) framework to run on the new system, because God forbid that Microsoft should provide a decent upgrade path from .net.
any project that isn't "How can I write something to sell more useless crap and make some business more money." Software can be like a miraculous tool. The fact that it's used mostly as a way to sell widgets to wankers on the web somewhere nauseates me daily. Microsoft is notably awful in this regard. If you're creating medical or engineering software, you don't exist for them. Not enough money.
this is just a natural progression.
Why, pshaw! How do you think the atmosphere ignited when the meteors hit?
Nonsense. They sang show tunes and were summarily executed by all other animals after one too many renditions of "Oklahoma."
Pick one.
Welcome to the wonderful wild world of outsourcing.
Of course, having one's memory wiped by getting too close to a magnet *is* an unfortunate side effect.
It's the biggest MMO there is, my friend. And it happened way before the internet or computers.
Cheers!
You mean tiny rectangular rooms with controlled environments where the subjects feed at regular intervals and are trained to press buttons to receive tiny rewards.
Whoops! Gotta go type up that report or I won't get that bonus or that bigger cubicle down the hall.
While its true that nuclear power is the only immediately scalable power source we have that can fill in for coal and gas powered electrical generation at anything like the current scale, there are a number of problems this doesn't even begin to solve.
One of the biggest is transportation technology and battery technology. The energy crisis coming from oil depletion over the next few decades would be little more than an inconvenience if the world's transportation systems were run on electricity instead of petroleum. Right now, batteries still don't have enough energy density at a price point that makes them worth using. At the moment, we're dependent on oil for so much that even our coal and nuclear plants couldn't operate without it (Remember Fukashima's Diesel back-up generators?). Similarly, coal and nuclear fuel travel on oil, are mined using petroleum based machines, transported on diesel oil trains, and so on.
So, in a nutshell, the problem is one of over dependence on ONE kind of fuel (i.e. oil) at the expense of all others for ONE service (i.e. transportation).
Changing this configuration is distinctly non-trivial, and frankly, we as a civilization dependent on money, cheap and available oil, and a just-in-time supply chain may be out of time to fix it. At least not quickly enough to avoid having a goodish number of the world's inhabitants die of starvation.
Reports have started to trickle in from outlying areas stating that "The turtle stands on its own back." The turtle, in an exclusive interview with our reporters, refused to confirm or deny this, stating that it was a "personal" matter and that his first obligation was to shield his family of child universes from embarrassment.
Reality hacked by Anonymous. Universe found to be resting on back of large turtle. Film at 11:00.
Gen-ED is about WHY you're programming something in the first place. CS courses are about HOW to program. The HOW always follows from the WHY.
You can't be a good programmer without understanding what a program (or any other machine) is for. ALL Technology (including software) ONLY exists to serve humans in all their varied social, economic, political, philosophical and psychological contexts. It is a tool. Nothing more. To be a good toolmaker, you need to understand that a financial planner has very different needs, desires and skills compared to a building engineer, or a consumer sentiment analyst or a teacher, or a writer. They all eat too, but what, why and how they eat, and for what purposes other than nutrition vary wildly. It's the same with software.
designing a power plant that fails because grid power is down, with no automated method of switchover to internally generated power.
Eyeroll please!
Drug laws have always been used as a quick method of imprisoning undesirables like black people, poor people, Hispanics, and people who break their eggs a the small end. While we now have much more sophisticated methods (e.g. the patriot act), drug laws still give law enforcement a tool\excuse to keep down those annoying [Fill in the blank] people. While our "leadership" won't want to give that up, imprisonment is expensive, and pot keeps the [Fill in the blank] people passive, so there's at least a better chance of decriminalization than there used to be.
Quite so. To be more accurate, make coding look like an activity that makes as much as lawyering or doctoring or any other profession where Johny isn't competing with a $5/hr labor pool in a $50/hr price environment, and Johny will start taking coding seriously as a career.
In the meantime all the corporate and political blather about education and training is just posturing and feel-good sound bites. Makes a decent marketing tool.
Currently, the USA has a tax and legal structure that does not make outsourcing at all difficult. If we weren't forced into a frothing ideological debates over socialism vs. capitalism every time the conversation starts, we could probably find a way to make it more attractive to in-source than outsource.
1) Microsoft has obviously decided to exit the software language tool and production business. The income generated from it barely amounts to a rounding error on their bottom line.
2) Microsoft doesn't give a crap about developers and their intellectual investment in any technology. India has lots of developers. They're disposable. Bill's trying to get potential future developers in Africa healthier and better educated as we speak. It ensures a constant pool of cheap labor.
3) Microsoft makes its money through its OS, Office, business service and game platforms, so unless you're a large organization selling widgets/services/games to wankers on the web, or servicing the software of those who do, you're irrelevant to Microsoft.