Sounds like the US is preparing itself too. Wonder what the equivalent of MAGINOT BLUE STARS is going to be? There must be something eldritch you can do with tens of thousands of TSA staff combined with teraherz scanners...
(For obscure references, see http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html)
I must offer my heartfelt apologies. Sometimes, rhetoric is used to convey insights between people in a debate, within the precept of 'I may be wrong and you may be right: come let us reason together.' Sometimes, rhetoric is used to convince people of the value of an idea, whether or not they entertained it themselves earlier. But in this case, rhetoric is apparently being used to build group cohesion by disparaging your perceived opponents, associating them with the holocaust denialists, who are perceived as harmless only by those who fail to remember or refuse to understand their 20th century history. I failed to see this: more fool I.
I therefore wish you good luck with your self-esteem and cosy groupthink: do keep on using whatever terms you wish, since you aren't interested in convincing anybody outside your group. After all, a little polarization is a small price to pay for feeling good about oneself.
But what's your point? Are you saying that any time one of the various non-holocaust denialisms is discussed, raising the issue of the holocaust constitutes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler? I disagree.
I'm suggesting equating standpoints you don't like with holocaust denialism trivializes the holocaust and its unsavoury denialists. Trying to tar your opponents with that particular brush is an unworthy tactic which alienates rather than convinces your opponents.
Now, 'uncritical skepticism' I might buy as a term. Think about it.
Denalism is by no means limited to Holocaust denial. Along with AIDS denialism, flat-earthism, tobacco denialism and AGW denialism, holocaust denial is merely a species of denialism. For it to be classified as denialism (as opposed to scepticism, for instance), it must involve the outright refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality, as we can witness with both Holocaust or AGW denial.
Speaking of rhetorical strategies, is Godwin's law an empirically verifiable reality?
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
Far right? Too simplistic. You may not like all their editorial stances, but that does not make them right (sic!). They were and remain skeptical of proposed measures against global warming: would they be effective? would they be efficient? which aren't bad questions to raise for a magazine with that name. Being skeptical is not necessarily 'denying', especially if you prove willing to change your stance with further evidence. They also want to abolish the British monarchy (for starters): not exactly the position one traditionally associates with the conservative right. On Iraqi WMD they were duped and admitted it frankly: so were plenty of other publications and institutions few would call 'right-wing'. They also fell heads-over-heel for Obama.
Me? I'm just a sucker for beatiful and efficient prose, with an occasional dash of dry humour. Would that I could achieve it.
Well, do you want to pay 50% more up front for your car instead? The car industry currently sells new cars at break even or at a loss, and instead attempt to make money on the after market. Right now, it's business suicide to use open and accessible standards and interfaces. And it's business suicide to outprice your competitors on new cars. Your move: they're stuck.
How interesting that you accuse Lomborg 'and his ilk' (no loaded language here, no, siree!) of spouting pseudoscientific garbage and being of a kind with religious fundamentalists. With what spectacles have you read Lomborg? You have read him, surely? Are you perchance confusing those who disagree with scientists as disagreeing with science?
The mere fact that you have trouble convicing someone does not automatically mean that they are wrong.
Your accusations reflect badly on yourself, which is fine, but also on your position, which is worse. The self-righteous certainty of AGW proponents are a much greater threat to the long term management of the Earth's environment than any skeptics, 'denialists', or fundamentalists: you do your cause great disservice. Please take a moment to recite the fundamentals of the scientific process: You may be right and I may be wrong: come, let us reason together.
... why this isn't obvious, and being done already?
From my layman's POV, it seems like we have telescopes all over the spectrum, from X-rays to long radio waves, constantly gathering enormous amounts of data which could easily be mined for dark energy detection, SETI, and just about anything else conceivable. So while I think it's very cool that two such different applications can share data and techniques, I'd like to know what the reasons are that this doesn't just happen all the time. Is it a reluctance to share data, differences in the type of data needed, or something else entirely?
I have a huge number of programs on my hard drive for everything from web browsing and word processing to Java IDE's and hard disk defragmenting. Why can't I get by with just one program which can do everything?
"Preventive maintenance fixes bugs which have not yet been reported" - surely though these bugs have been found by some kind of testing? Otherwise how do you know that they are actually bugs or are actually fixed? I've seen so many "optimisations to help scaling" over the years that were performed without any empirical evidence as to whether they actually helped or not. Quite a lot actually made things a lot *less* scaleable.
Um... in an ideal world, sure. Scaling is just an example. Potential buffer overflows in low level code, wasteful roundtrips, insecure password storage, UI inconsistencies, ignored edge cases... You can only afford to create and maintain so many tests. If you do other kinds of maintenance, you are going to discover shortcomings that can be addressed.
Taking code and cutting its size by half, fixing up all the screwed-up inconsistent formatting, while adding functionality and reducing bug counts, is a pleasure.
Yes it is.
But that is not maintenance, as practiced by any rational company. That is development or (more specifically) optimization.
Maintenance is about solving a problem code is having, with the absolute smallest number of changes possible. Even new features can fall under this heading when software is in true "maintenance mode" in order to avoid a lot of excess testing.
I actually don't mind it, as it is a different sort of challenge to take a code base you know little about and introduce a working change with as little code as possible. But it's not as glamorous as fresh, raw coding.
Software maintenance tasks fall into one of four categories:
Corrective maintenance fixes bugs in the maintenance object.
Preventive maintenance fixes bugs which have not yet been reported (including e.g. problems that would hinder application scaling).
Adaptive maintenance works around bugs in external objects (the O/S, the DBMS, integrated apps, whatnot).
Perfective maintenance makes the application easier to maintain in the future.
Perfective maintenance is what the grandparent post is talking about. A rational company balances these four kinds of maintenance against the expected future lifetime and current value of the software investment. Now, most software owning organizations are less than rational, but that's a different problem!
Well, also, the Romans genuinely wanted and expected the things they built to last forever. I don't suppose the people who designed the Bay Bridge asked themselves, "Will this structure still work five hundred years from now? A thousand years from now?" But Roman builders did.
No, they didn't. They were just as pragmatic then as we are now. Most Roman buildings aren't around anymore, except for those that were ridiculously over-engineered and didn't tick off some passing barbarian too much.
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That would be because the Romans had some engineering, but not the equations we have today, so they over-engineered their bridges for safety because they knew they couldn't calculate the exact, optimal configuration for the expected loads and stresses. Over-engineering is a good thing if you don't have to account to the bean-counters. The George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River was also over-engineered because they didn't know the exact tolerances, and it has held up rather well.
The Romans built plenty of bridges that collapsed. The ones we have left are exactly those that were over-engineered. The Romans were no less short-sighted than we are: they just didn't know as well how close to the edge they could get, so the outer extremes of the Bell curve are still around. We're better engineers, so I'd deem it likely that nothing we've built during the last century is gonna be around in a couple of millennia.
Nevertheless, I fail to see why XP and generally the "Agile" crowd has to compare itself only to the Waterfall Model, every single time. It's getting like listening to the Creationist crowd: they can't even make their point without devolving into just bad-mouthing Darwinism.
Let's not strawman the strawman argument. I see plenty of comparisons with [R]UP, for instance. Or does nobody actually practice that one, with or without iterations?
Oh, right, yet another valiant effort at demolishing a strawman of the Waterfal Model... which never really meant the carricature opposed by the "agile" crowd, and wasn't applied that way. Ever heard of iterations? Right. Apparently the agile crowd still never heard that anyone else uses those.
Congratulations on never having been exposed to the literal waterfall. In other news, it's still very much alive and kicking, despite the intent of the original paper to promote the spiral (incremental) model. (Hint to moderators: change parent from +5 insightful to +5 painfully funny.)
Interacting with computers and software is becoming less and less a matter of choice, particularly but not exclusively in the developed world... but what I'm talking about is whether the complexity of either is necessary or not. There is essential complexity, and there's accidental complexity (which can be removed with sufficient genious).
Sure, many laws can be simplified, and from what I've heard of e.g. the US tax code, some laws should be tossed out and rebuilt, ground-up (although that would probably be at least on par with rebuilding the US air traffic control system, and that seems to be a walk in the park, right?). But personally, I'd prefer my judges to be somewhat constrained in their decisions. It's all a matter of trust and balance of power, y'know? Sure, a judicial system with lower complexity laws could be great, as long as the judges are wise, caring and benevolent. It's just that I know that they're people like myself that has me worried! In Sweden we actually have a jurisprudence tradition which requires judges to conform to the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The result? The law book is mostly just an index into various massive public pre-study reports ('offentliga utredningar') which have precedence over the actual wording in the law... but can be quite ambigious.
IANAL, but I'd be so bold as to make a claim that 98% of the statute books in most countries have no direct impact on you, personally (granted, the 2% which does will vary somewhat between people, depending on what you do for fun and for a living). Civil, criminal, administrative, constitutional laws: how many of them impact you, or just corporations, public bodies, or situations and relations you will never find yourself in? Unfortunately, some of those laws interact with laws which do impact you... but my guess is that most of those interactions are essential complexity rather than poor delimitation.
Mind you, the bodies of laws and jurisprudence in existence in the West has been designed and built bottom-up for centuries (or millennia, since we all have at least a dash of Roman law somewhere). As with any system that has seen multiple maintainers, lots of different stakeholders with shifting concerns (several of which do not even exist in any recognizable form today), and rapid changes in its environment, the body of law is a huge mess. On the other hand it has the distinct advantage to any radical alternative that it has actually been tested, and works, at least somewhat. Ask e.g. the Russians if they are entirely happy with their own reimplementation effort of 90 years past... the French might be more satisfied with theirs, but it's had a chance to go through almost a couple of centuries of use and revision. The US created their own branch a few decades before that, but kept most of their legacy code at the time...!
I am quite happy to have a world with fewer programmers. The profession itself is evidence that computers are too complex.
If a program is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone fix its bugs, their freedom to tinker is damaged.
The law is complex, because the world is complex. The alternative to complex law is arbitrary judgements, or the state retreating from adjudicating relationships among citizens and corporations. (OK, some wooly-eyed anarchist is going to salivate at the latter prospect, but personally, I prefer police and judges to arbitration by baseball bats.)
perhaps it's spiraling to its demise after billions of years in a decaying orbit.
More likely by far. The odds are always against gravitational capture: you need to get rid of a buttload of orbital momentum to convert a hyperbolic trajectory (hello, goodbye for ever!) into an elliptical or circular orbit.
Impressively OT! So 90 % of the mass of the Milky Way (and every other galaxy we've measured the rotation of) consists of computronium in the form of Jupiter or Matrioshka brains? Interesting theory, but where's the infrared radiation? Or have they progressed to perform fully reversible computations? Now that would be sailing very close to magic!
For those who think nano-engineering is going to be easy, I suggest go reading a book or two on control theory and thermodynamics. Even if we manage to build something resilient enough to survive outside a pure laboratory environment (much less a computer simulation!), and smart enough to do useful work, energy supply and heat dissipation is still going to be huge problems. I personally think it's going to be solvable, but we ain't gonna be getting any magic pixie dust, just another technology with clear limitations and associated costs. Especially when applied to complex biological systems such as, y'know, the Earth and ourselves.
Um, sorry, but do you seriously think the Apollo program wasn't managed like a project, with quality assurance and heaps of subcontractor management hazzles? If so, perhaps you'd better not read any histories. The sound of illusions shattering can be so disheartening...
Aerospace engineering had damned well better be managed and QA'd to within an inch of its life, if the metal is to get off the ground at all without killing everybody in a five hundred meter radius, simply because Bert thought Ernie knew which tank to fill with LOX (or Ken thought Bill always used the metric system of measurements). And even so...
You wouldn't happen to have anything which actually substantiates a ban on open source software as a prerequisite for funding schools and libraries? Apart from Stallman's rants?
Tactile response is a huge reason we have keyboards. The technology that can replace them is here now, and has been for quite a while. But nothing can beat the practicality of a keyboard. Replacing it with a touchscreen is just impractical. There's no tactile response, and banging your fingers on a hard, unyielding surface is going to cause typing fatigue much quicker./.../
Slashdot Mirror
Queue torrent of bullshit about wars and history. Atheists are just theists with a post-modern stick up their arse.
For another correction, that would be 'Cue'. Is that the stick lodged in my colon? What a fascinating theory!
...facepalm!
Sounds like the US is preparing itself too. Wonder what the equivalent of MAGINOT BLUE STARS is going to be? There must be something eldritch you can do with tens of thousands of TSA staff combined with teraherz scanners... (For obscure references, see http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html)
I must offer my heartfelt apologies. Sometimes, rhetoric is used to convey insights between people in a debate, within the precept of 'I may be wrong and you may be right: come let us reason together.' Sometimes, rhetoric is used to convince people of the value of an idea, whether or not they entertained it themselves earlier. But in this case, rhetoric is apparently being used to build group cohesion by disparaging your perceived opponents, associating them with the holocaust denialists, who are perceived as harmless only by those who fail to remember or refuse to understand their 20th century history. I failed to see this: more fool I.
I therefore wish you good luck with your self-esteem and cosy groupthink: do keep on using whatever terms you wish, since you aren't interested in convincing anybody outside your group. After all, a little polarization is a small price to pay for feeling good about oneself.
But what's your point? Are you saying that any time one of the various non-holocaust denialisms is discussed, raising the issue of the holocaust constitutes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler? I disagree.
I'm suggesting equating standpoints you don't like with holocaust denialism trivializes the holocaust and its unsavoury denialists. Trying to tar your opponents with that particular brush is an unworthy tactic which alienates rather than convinces your opponents.
Now, 'uncritical skepticism' I might buy as a term. Think about it.
Denalism is by no means limited to Holocaust denial. Along with AIDS denialism, flat-earthism, tobacco denialism and AGW denialism, holocaust denial is merely a species of denialism. For it to be classified as denialism (as opposed to scepticism, for instance), it must involve the outright refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality, as we can witness with both Holocaust or AGW denial.
Speaking of rhetorical strategies, is Godwin's law an empirically verifiable reality?
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
Far right? Too simplistic. You may not like all their editorial stances, but that does not make them right (sic!). They were and remain skeptical of proposed measures against global warming: would they be effective? would they be efficient? which aren't bad questions to raise for a magazine with that name. Being skeptical is not necessarily 'denying', especially if you prove willing to change your stance with further evidence. They also want to abolish the British monarchy (for starters): not exactly the position one traditionally associates with the conservative right. On Iraqi WMD they were duped and admitted it frankly: so were plenty of other publications and institutions few would call 'right-wing'. They also fell heads-over-heel for Obama.
Me? I'm just a sucker for beatiful and efficient prose, with an occasional dash of dry humour. Would that I could achieve it.
Well, do you want to pay 50% more up front for your car instead? The car industry currently sells new cars at break even or at a loss, and instead attempt to make money on the after market. Right now, it's business suicide to use open and accessible standards and interfaces. And it's business suicide to outprice your competitors on new cars. Your move: they're stuck.
How interesting that you accuse Lomborg 'and his ilk' (no loaded language here, no, siree!) of spouting pseudoscientific garbage and being of a kind with religious fundamentalists. With what spectacles have you read Lomborg? You have read him, surely? Are you perchance confusing those who disagree with scientists as disagreeing with science?
The mere fact that you have trouble convicing someone does not automatically mean that they are wrong.
Your accusations reflect badly on yourself, which is fine, but also on your position, which is worse. The self-righteous certainty of AGW proponents are a much greater threat to the long term management of the Earth's environment than any skeptics, 'denialists', or fundamentalists: you do your cause great disservice. Please take a moment to recite the fundamentals of the scientific process: You may be right and I may be wrong: come, let us reason together.
... why this isn't obvious, and being done already?
From my layman's POV, it seems like we have telescopes all over the spectrum, from X-rays to long radio waves, constantly gathering enormous amounts of data which could easily be mined for dark energy detection, SETI, and just about anything else conceivable. So while I think it's very cool that two such different applications can share data and techniques, I'd like to know what the reasons are that this doesn't just happen all the time. Is it a reluctance to share data, differences in the type of data needed, or something else entirely?
I have a huge number of programs on my hard drive for everything from web browsing and word processing to Java IDE's and hard disk defragmenting. Why can't I get by with just one program which can do everything?
Oh, wait, I just installed Emacs. Problem solved!
"Preventive maintenance fixes bugs which have not yet been reported" - surely though these bugs have been found by some kind of testing? Otherwise how do you know that they are actually bugs or are actually fixed? I've seen so many "optimisations to help scaling" over the years that were performed without any empirical evidence as to whether they actually helped or not. Quite a lot actually made things a lot *less* scaleable.
Um... in an ideal world, sure. Scaling is just an example. Potential buffer overflows in low level code, wasteful roundtrips, insecure password storage, UI inconsistencies, ignored edge cases... You can only afford to create and maintain so many tests. If you do other kinds of maintenance, you are going to discover shortcomings that can be addressed.
Taking code and cutting its size by half, fixing up all the screwed-up inconsistent formatting, while adding functionality and reducing bug counts, is a pleasure.
Yes it is.
But that is not maintenance, as practiced by any rational company. That is development or (more specifically) optimization.
Maintenance is about solving a problem code is having, with the absolute smallest number of changes possible. Even new features can fall under this heading when software is in true "maintenance mode" in order to avoid a lot of excess testing.
I actually don't mind it, as it is a different sort of challenge to take a code base you know little about and introduce a working change with as little code as possible. But it's not as glamorous as fresh, raw coding.
Software maintenance tasks fall into one of four categories:
Perfective maintenance is what the grandparent post is talking about. A rational company balances these four kinds of maintenance against the expected future lifetime and current value of the software investment. Now, most software owning organizations are less than rational, but that's a different problem!
Well, also, the Romans genuinely wanted and expected the things they built to last forever. I don't suppose the people who designed the Bay Bridge asked themselves, "Will this structure still work five hundred years from now? A thousand years from now?" But Roman builders did.
No, they didn't. They were just as pragmatic then as we are now. Most Roman buildings aren't around anymore, except for those that were ridiculously over-engineered and didn't tick off some passing barbarian too much.
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That would be because the Romans had some engineering, but not the equations we have today, so they over-engineered their bridges for safety because they knew they couldn't calculate the exact, optimal configuration for the expected loads and stresses. Over-engineering is a good thing if you don't have to account to the bean-counters. The George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River was also over-engineered because they didn't know the exact tolerances, and it has held up rather well.
The Romans built plenty of bridges that collapsed. The ones we have left are exactly those that were over-engineered. The Romans were no less short-sighted than we are: they just didn't know as well how close to the edge they could get, so the outer extremes of the Bell curve are still around. We're better engineers, so I'd deem it likely that nothing we've built during the last century is gonna be around in a couple of millennia.
Nevertheless, I fail to see why XP and generally the "Agile" crowd has to compare itself only to the Waterfall Model, every single time. It's getting like listening to the Creationist crowd: they can't even make their point without devolving into just bad-mouthing Darwinism.
Let's not strawman the strawman argument. I see plenty of comparisons with [R]UP, for instance. Or does nobody actually practice that one, with or without iterations?
Oh, right, yet another valiant effort at demolishing a strawman of the Waterfal Model... which never really meant the carricature opposed by the "agile" crowd, and wasn't applied that way. Ever heard of iterations? Right. Apparently the agile crowd still never heard that anyone else uses those.
Congratulations on never having been exposed to the literal waterfall. In other news, it's still very much alive and kicking, despite the intent of the original paper to promote the spiral (incremental) model. (Hint to moderators: change parent from +5 insightful to +5 painfully funny.)
Interacting with computers and software is becoming less and less a matter of choice, particularly but not exclusively in the developed world... but what I'm talking about is whether the complexity of either is necessary or not. There is essential complexity, and there's accidental complexity (which can be removed with sufficient genious).
Sure, many laws can be simplified, and from what I've heard of e.g. the US tax code, some laws should be tossed out and rebuilt, ground-up (although that would probably be at least on par with rebuilding the US air traffic control system, and that seems to be a walk in the park, right?). But personally, I'd prefer my judges to be somewhat constrained in their decisions. It's all a matter of trust and balance of power, y'know? Sure, a judicial system with lower complexity laws could be great, as long as the judges are wise, caring and benevolent. It's just that I know that they're people like myself that has me worried! In Sweden we actually have a jurisprudence tradition which requires judges to conform to the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The result? The law book is mostly just an index into various massive public pre-study reports ('offentliga utredningar') which have precedence over the actual wording in the law... but can be quite ambigious.
IANAL, but I'd be so bold as to make a claim that 98% of the statute books in most countries have no direct impact on you, personally (granted, the 2% which does will vary somewhat between people, depending on what you do for fun and for a living). Civil, criminal, administrative, constitutional laws: how many of them impact you, or just corporations, public bodies, or situations and relations you will never find yourself in? Unfortunately, some of those laws interact with laws which do impact you... but my guess is that most of those interactions are essential complexity rather than poor delimitation.
Mind you, the bodies of laws and jurisprudence in existence in the West has been designed and built bottom-up for centuries (or millennia, since we all have at least a dash of Roman law somewhere). As with any system that has seen multiple maintainers, lots of different stakeholders with shifting concerns (several of which do not even exist in any recognizable form today), and rapid changes in its environment, the body of law is a huge mess. On the other hand it has the distinct advantage to any radical alternative that it has actually been tested, and works, at least somewhat. Ask e.g. the Russians if they are entirely happy with their own reimplementation effort of 90 years past... the French might be more satisfied with theirs, but it's had a chance to go through almost a couple of centuries of use and revision. The US created their own branch a few decades before that, but kept most of their legacy code at the time...!
I am quite happy to have a world with fewer programmers. The profession itself is evidence that computers are too complex.
If a program is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone fix its bugs, their freedom to tinker is damaged.
The law is complex, because the world is complex. The alternative to complex law is arbitrary judgements, or the state retreating from adjudicating relationships among citizens and corporations. (OK, some wooly-eyed anarchist is going to salivate at the latter prospect, but personally, I prefer police and judges to arbitration by baseball bats.)
...well, OK, not in terms of energy consumption, but still thinking big! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
perhaps it's spiraling to its demise after billions of years in a decaying orbit.
More likely by far. The odds are always against gravitational capture: you need to get rid of a buttload of orbital momentum to convert a hyperbolic trajectory (hello, goodbye for ever!) into an elliptical or circular orbit.
Impressively OT! So 90 % of the mass of the Milky Way (and every other galaxy we've measured the rotation of) consists of computronium in the form of Jupiter or Matrioshka brains? Interesting theory, but where's the infrared radiation? Or have they progressed to perform fully reversible computations? Now that would be sailing very close to magic!
For those who think nano-engineering is going to be easy, I suggest go reading a book or two on control theory and thermodynamics. Even if we manage to build something resilient enough to survive outside a pure laboratory environment (much less a computer simulation!), and smart enough to do useful work, energy supply and heat dissipation is still going to be huge problems. I personally think it's going to be solvable, but we ain't gonna be getting any magic pixie dust, just another technology with clear limitations and associated costs. Especially when applied to complex biological systems such as, y'know, the Earth and ourselves.
Um, sorry, but do you seriously think the Apollo program wasn't managed like a project, with quality assurance and heaps of subcontractor management hazzles? If so, perhaps you'd better not read any histories. The sound of illusions shattering can be so disheartening...
Aerospace engineering had damned well better be managed and QA'd to within an inch of its life, if the metal is to get off the ground at all without killing everybody in a five hundred meter radius, simply because Bert thought Ernie knew which tank to fill with LOX (or Ken thought Bill always used the metric system of measurements). And even so...
You wouldn't happen to have anything which actually substantiates a ban on open source software as a prerequisite for funding schools and libraries? Apart from Stallman's rants?
Never underestimate the longevity of any SW artifact, especially in corporate environments.
Tactile response is a huge reason we have keyboards. The technology that can replace them is here now, and has been for quite a while. But nothing can beat the practicality of a keyboard. Replacing it with a touchscreen is just impractical. There's no tactile response, and banging your fingers on a hard, unyielding surface is going to cause typing fatigue much quicker. /.../
This seems promising...