While what you say is indeed true, in practice the farther human behavior changes from what we are adapted for, the more stress people are under and the more likely social systems and/or the people in them will fail. In the case of early development up to age two to four, it seems clear humans are wired for learning from social interactions with caregivers as well as physical hand-eye interactions with the natural environment including rocks, plants, sand, water, and so on. Still, on the plus side, one reason tablets are so successful with young children compared to interfaces that require a mouse or trackpad is that it supports the direct hand-eye manipulation young kids seem wired for.

So, while it is true that me could in theory do better, the human brain being flexible, it is not clear that anything we have done in modern times has overall made the experience of being a young child any better than it was 10,000 years ago (other than perhaps reduced infant mortality). Even the modern diet is mostly destructive to health, although obviously it is generally better than starving to death. Addictions also exploit human adaptations that once made sense (preferring sweet, fat, and salt) where when industrialized foods are engineered to emphasize those things to the exclusion of all else, the end result is people's health suffering even as their body tells them to keep eating junk. I've posted links several times before about books and essay by other people on how to escape the pleasure trap, on supernormal stimuli, and on the acceleration of addictiveness and similar things.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-...
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play...

These things could apply to children of any age as well as adults. And likely that includes something TV and various games exploit, which is a "startle reflex" to moving things that forces the human mind to pay immediate attention to them, since in the past humans who did not may have died from a snake bite or tiger or whatever. But now, continually changing TV images can use that reflex to keep us captivated, even while our body or the rest of our lives suffer. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore posited that watching television has an impact on the orienting response, an effect similar to vicarious traumatization."

As people grow up through their mid-twenties, parts of the brain develop that provide more control for longer term planning, with perhaps some more hope of dealing with the worst of all this. But for young children, they are easy prey to people who would somehow make money of this, whether food scientists or media content providers or tablet software developers. And parents are so overburdened between two full-time wage earners and their own pleasure traps with extended families so broken up that there is little time for parents to deal with all the possible traps for their children. Kids remain resilient, and learn from everything they do, but there are still issues of long-term happiness and the quality of the experience. Or, in other words, manufactured ice cream may seem yummy, but it is ultimately is bad for the health if consumed in mass quantities. And if we spend all our will power resisting the lure of ice cream, then there is little left over to resist other things or do other tasks.

See also stuff on "Ego depletion"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draw upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up."

Humor is one thing that can help restore willpower sooner. :-)

Again, in theory we could do much better. In practice, especially in a capitalist system that rewards short-term thinking that privatizes gains and socializes costs, whether we can achieve the promise from that capacity to learn that you mention remains to be seen. I can wonder if, overall, we are indeed losing the battle and "amusing ourselves to death"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control."

BTW, music has been suggested to be a way that humans develop logical reasoning ability as well as social cohesion at an early age in a safe way, learning about patterns of music while the outcome is not that big a deal. Admittedly, some of that is speculative, but see for example:
http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu...

Also, regarding your sig, see also: http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

Still, I hope you are right, and optimism tends to be a good thing, especially compared to disempowering despair! :-)
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
http://www.activehope.info/

As I see it, given the universe is probably a simulation (Edward Fredkin talks about this, among others), the issue is not where energy comes from, where the computational matrix came from. This assumes that is indeed a valid question, since philosophically the nature of consciousness may just assume computation or somehow be one with it.

To understand my point, consider if you were to make a simulation of the Milky Way Galaxy colliding with Andromeda, like in this cool video:
"GTC2012 Kepler GPU Demo: When Galaxies Collide "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"In this video, Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang and Stephen Jones demonstrate the power of the new Kepler GPU. This astronomy simulation shows that the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 4-5 Billion years from now."

When writing the code, you would realize that the total amount of energy you put in the simulation is essentially arbitrary. You can set the kinetic energy of motion of all the individual simulated bits to whatever you wanted (up to the limits of how you store the numbers by flipping bits in silicon). The potential energy of gravitation or electromagnetism you create in the simulation is likewise essentially arbitrary, based on how you place the initial components and how you set gravitational constants and electromagnetic constants. Granted, there are consequences to how you set all those parameters, but that is a different design constraint based on aesthetics or purpose.

So, from my viewpoint, it is quite possible that "energy" and "matter" are probably essentially arbitrary. Someone with control over low-level aspects of the simulation (maybe even humans, someday) could magic matter and energy into existence as easily as a banking computer could magic trillions of dollars into existence by flipping a few bits on a hard drive or computer memory or fiber optic messages somewhere. Granted, there are social consequences to such currency creations, and likely would also be some social consequences somewhere as well to magicking matter and energy. :-)

But, that still leaves the question of where the computational matrix came from. Or, as is mentioned here, what implements the virtual turtles all the way down. :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
https://mail.python.org/piperm...

Still, as another Slashdot story or poster months or years ago said, there is a some finite probability infinity will create itself from absolute nothingness, given the lack of constraints in complete nothingness. So, that could explain it all in that sense. :-)

Granted, my comments and musings on all this is perhaps just like a bacterium trying to make sense of what is happening while it is on the wing of a jetliner -- or no doubt the situation is even stranger. So, just some thoughts and possibilities. And of course, as other posters have said, or Iain Banks in "Excession", this is an "Out-of-context problem" which can not be that well addressed by typical scientific paradigms or rules of inquiry, since we are talking about things beyond the tiny circle of light cast by the comparatively feeble flickering of human mind and society, relative to a vast infinity of infinities and so on.

Still, we don't fully understand the human mind or consciousness either, so who really knows what it is possible to understand or not understand. We don't even know how long "humans" in a sense "live", with life after life as a possibility (like if "life is but a dream" or a game or learning experience we will wake up from and go onto other experiences), and so on.

Again, these all quickly become religious and philosophical questions -- but that does not mean they are not important or interesting. Although it does mean they are not that open to conventional "scientific" exploration of repeatable experiments (or, of course, funded explorations from "scientific" organizations :-). Still, for centuries the Roman Catholic Church (as one example among many) in a sense underwrote such explorations in terms of supporting theologians and priests and monks and nuns and so on (as well as much other things of even more controversy). And it still does to some extent. And flickers of such inquiry can show up anywhere now and then, even places like Slashdot when it is not in an offline mood. :-)

(I wanted to reply to this when you first posted, but Slashdot was in one of its increasingly often offline moods... Just getting back to it now.)

I agree, although it remains painful economically as pointed out by another commented in reply. My wife and I put more than size person years into making a free (GPL) garden simulator and related web site in the 1990s, and while we did not make any money directly from that specific software, we like to think that we got the entire freely accessible world wide web and world of open source software in return. :-) And that was a really good deal. :-)

As I write on my own site, there are several forms of economic transactions (including subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). Each has its own dynamics. They do interact with each other in various ways, but is is complex.

Personally, I feel we need a "basic income", like by expanding Social Security in the USA to everyman from birth, not just people over 65 years of age. Then everyone who wanted to write free software would have the time do do so. Hopefully, over time, a growing gift economy and a growing 3D-printer- and personal-robot- and solar-powered- subsistence economy might crowd out much of the exchange economy, in the same way the exchange economy crowded out much of the others in the last few decades.

In the meanwhile, I do mostly unrelated consulting work now and then to pay the bills. That's done well enough recently to give my wife time to make a free book on "Working with Stories In Your Community Or Organization"
http://www.workingwithstories....

And we're working on some software (likely free) to go with it. But soon enough it will probably be back to consulting or such...

Poetry from the 15th century: https://books.google.com/books...

"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

Other variations on the poem: https://books.google.com/books...

I got curious about that first phrase as it is the name of a Culture ship in Iain Bank's novel "Excession". :-)

And see also a funny sci-fi story about an alien invasion getting all the nations of the Earth to come together, like: "The Gentle Earth" by Christopher Anvil. :-) Or also "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

So yes, there may well be various social cycles in mood and expectations... Daniel Quinn explores those in his non-fiction book "Beyond Civilization". But I can hope it doesn't need to get that bad, and that we can relearn old truths from old stories less painfully than re-experiencing them first hand...

Anyway, glad we got a VIZIO a year or two ago. :-) Concerns about some smart features in other TVs (as previously discussed on Slashdot) did affect that choice. We barely use it though. It was mostly for use with a Wii and PlayStation, which have faded into the background compared to PC games like Space Engineers, Minecraft, and World of Tanks. Laptops (even a 14" Chromebook) are also much more convenient in our particular home for watching video together given where the VIZIO is. Still, the big VIZIO makes a great display for a tiny Raspberry Pi! :-)

But to think what my feelings were reading 1984 decades ago, and how impossible and fantastical it seemed to have spy cameras and spy recordings going on in every US home (along with Dick Tracy's impossible-seeming two-way wrist TV). And now we are pretty much there in terms of technology (even just laptops, let alone TVs). I hope we find better ways to use all that to build a happy healthy world that works for pretty much everyone.

That reduces blood flow to the brain as well as other vital organs. That clogging is typical on the Standard American diet, which causes arterial inflammation in multiple ways including sugar spikes and then supplies "bad" fats to repair them (as opposed to "good" fats which we absolutely need). Sadly, the first obvious symptom of clogged arteries may be death from a heart attack or stroke. Even when people detect clogging in the heart and put in stents to temporarily (ofter a few months) deal with it, stents do nothing for clogs in your brain or liver or elsewhere.

Check out the writings of people like Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, or Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn for a better way to eat that will also improve your brain power to be a better software developer.

In essence, the advice is eat more vegetables and fruits and beans, eat healthy fats like from avocados and nuts and/or free range pasture-fed animal products, get enough iodine like from seaweed and vitamin D from sunlight or supplements and B complex depending on other food sources, get extra micronutrients from seeds, eat whole grains meaning you can see the actual whole grain like a barley kernel in your food, eliminate most refined and processed foods including stuff made with white flour and processed sugar and especially processed meats with additives, eliminate synthetic additives like synthetic colorings and synthetic flavorings, avoid food with bromine in it as in many dough conditioners for breads, and so on. In general, eat a variety of foods of a variety of different colors (the colors reflect different essential phytonutrients). There are lots of nuances, and some things may not work well for everyone depending on your gut bacteria and genetics and lifestyle, so it may be a bit of a learning curve for what works for you. Most of that battle is actually won or lost in the supermarket, because once food is in the home, it is almost certain it will be eaten in reverse order of healthiness for various psychological and adaptive/evolutionary reasons.

See also this advice for if or more likely when you do fail a "stress test" for your heart and your cardiologist tries to rush you into getting a bunch of stents:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Sitting for long times is also problematical. Look into at least a standing desk, and maybe a treadmill workstation. Exercises and good breathing is important for health too, even if the connection to actual weight loss is more complex.

Good luck on possibly a very long journey towards wellness. One I've been on now for many years, but with its ups and downs, wins and losses, forward movements and setbacks. A natural reaction to excessive stress is also to eat more because in the past stress meant future meals are less certain so it was good to fatten up when you could. Over the long term, the social, psychological, community, and even spiritual aspects of this entire process become very important. It's not easy to become well in our culture, with so many highly-paid people working for processed food companies whose job is to catch us up and trap us or trick us and make us stumble including through constant advertising and engineered foodstuffs and also social pressure all so some food processor can privatize gains and socialized costs.

See also, for how aspects of such a change may be easier than most people think:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

And now that I search on that: http://www.medicalnewstoday.co...
"Majority of weight loss occurs 'via breathing' ... According to researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia, when weight is lost, the majority of it is breathed out as carbon dioxide. Their paper is published in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. Prof. Andrew Brown and Ruben Meerman reported widespread misconception regarding how weight is lost, finding physicians, dietitians and personal trainers all equally guilty of not knowing. ... The results suggest that the lungs are the main excretory organ for weight loss, with the H20 produced by oxidation departing the body in urine, feces, breath and other bodily fluids. On average, a person weighing 70 kg will exhale around 200 ml of CO2 in 12 breaths each minute. The authors calculate that each breath contains 33 mg of CO2, with 8.9 mg comprised of carbon. A total of 17,280 breaths during the day will get rid of at least 200 g of carbon, with roughly a third of this weight loss occurring during 8 hours of sleep. ..."

I've heard stuff now and then from Andrew Weil on breathing, and breathing well is at the core of Yoga, but your anecdote helps me make a better connection to all that. It may indeed apply very broadly. Thanks!

I've heard in general exercise is great for health (gets the lymph moving to boost the immune system, to begin with), but in general it does not affect weight loss much because people who exercise more tend to eat more after a workout as the body tries to compensate. However, I can wonder if changes in breathing patterns somehow work around that issue?

I would be curious if you had any good tips on what people can do to improve their breathing along the lines of what worked for you? Are they different than, for example, these exercises suggested by Dr. Andrew Weil?
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/AR...

BTW, one other thing missed in so much discussion here and elsewhere on weight is the psychological aspect. People can talk all they want about calories in and calories out, and even ignoring how the type of food and gut bacteria make a difference (as well as your point on breathing). However, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about, we essentially have an "appistat" like a thermostat for hunger, and what seems to control when it shuts off is how full we feel (in terms of physical bulk of fiber and such in the stomach) and also the amount of phytonutrients and micronutrients in the food. If you are not getting either (and the Standard American Diet tends to be lacking in *both*) then it is a continual psychological battle where your body is constantly telling you that you are not finished eating because of the lack of fiber and lack of good nutrients. So you keep eating junk (like processed white bread or sugary drinks), always searching for nutrition. The calories make you fat, but your body still thinks (correctly) that it is missing something, so it goes on trying to make you eat. And studies show that 95%+ of people on diets that focus on calories restriction fail in just a few months for this psychological aspect. We only have so much self-discipline. It is generally only when we change the nature of what we eat that we change our weight. Then we are using our self-discipline for only a short time (a few weeks) to change our eating habits and related taste preferences. After that, low-nutrient junk food generally is not so appealing. See also:
"How to Escape the Pleasure Trap"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Although, your point on breathing certainly is another angle on that. As is the general issue on gut bacteria, since both of those affect how much of our food's energy is burned (without really changing much else) or how much is collected or goes through the gut. So, I'm not saying dietary choices in that sense are the only factor, although they may be ones that most people may have a bunch of control over. Although obviously breathing better is something that could be shaped, as you did. And in our culture, like most, where food is such a big part of social life, there is no question that it may seem like what we eat often is beyond our control. A lot of times a move to better health can be a positive spiral. So, I can imagine that focusing on breathing better may lead to better feeling which may lead to more positive energy to make dietary changes that may lead to more energy to exercise better and again breath better, which may provide more energy for even more dietary improvements, and so on for an upward spiral.

While this is in general great practical advice (and no doubt hard won), I can quibble about your point #3 on complex dependency graphs requiring rewrites as the "only way out". Certainly this is more of an issue in C++ than something like Java where code can be more easily replaced at runtime. However, at least in Java, the idea of "mocking" can sometimes be useful to test code even with complex dependencies without (significant) initial rewriting.

I used mocking with JMockit successfully in the large Java project previously mentioned. I tried other frameworks, but preferred that one. JMockit supported creating unit tests for code which was not originally designed to be testable and had complex interdependencies in how objects were constructed. However, JMockit did have a substantial learning curve, even aside from hours spent trying to come up with tests for domain-specific specific code. Eventually I created some supporting code to make the mocking easier for our project, and then another developer improved even further on my work, making mocking our specific application much easier. So, at least in our situation, with a huge complex Java codebase in production, limited developer time, and limited tests initially, mocking was a big win IMHO that let us start to get a handle on everything without having to rewrite a lot of code at first.

That said, in general, code is easier to maintain and understand when it does not have complex dependencies. "Dependency Injection" is a good idea in a lot of cases -- although it can have its own downsides in making object construction code harder to follow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So, while I'm quibbling about "only way forward" because of the possibility of mocking, I'm not saying rewriting in such situations in necessarily a bad idea or even quicker than mocking sometimes -- especially as mocking can introduce its own issues.

With JMockit, one such unexpected issue was that mocking an object created mocks up the entire class hierarchy (causing issues when you wanted to mock one class but test a sibling class). This was a subtle issue that took a while to understand, and I did not see documented explicitly anywhere (at least in introductory material) although I think there was a bug/feature request about it somewhere.

Another JMockit issue was that mocks were instantiated and removed in relation to threading somehow and there could be issues with mocks remaining in place when previous unit tests had not completely finished running all their threads. This could sometimes lead to unit tests failing occasionally due to thread timing issues and the mocking, when a class that was mocked in one test or with certain "expectations" was then accessed by another unit test which mocked different objects or had different "expectations". Sometimes this (unfortunately) happened embarrassingly on other developer's machines with different OS or hardware or on our Hudson/Jenkins build server just by the force of numbers of times the tests were run. Usually I could get around these cases either by adding delays at the end of the unit test to let all the threads complete or, better, by having improved mocks or other code that ensured the threads were finished before the test ended.

That said, even with both of these issues, both frustrating to understand and then work around, mocking was still a big win for the project IMHO.

I have not used any C++ mocking frameworks so I don't know how well they work or what their limits are. However, for suggestions about some such frameworks see this StackOverflow discussion:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

The top rated answer there is about "Google Mock" but there are other choices.
https://code.google.com/p/goog...

I do not see the word "mock" used so far in this Slashdot discussion of tools for cleaning up C++ projects. I'd be curious what people's experiences are with C++ mocking frameworks, especially in comparison with what you can do with something like JMockit in Java?

Yeah, I feel that way too... See also my other comment to this story (which links to my Jan 15 comment).
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Or, as it says here:
""This Is Why RadioShack Is in Trouble"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
"Feb. 2 -- Radio Shack is in talks to close half it's stores and convert the other half into Spirit mobile shops. If that happens will anyone even notice? Bloomberg took to the streets of San Francisco to ask potential customers how much they really know about Radio Shack. The lack of knowledge or attachment to the brand illustrates just why Radio Shack is going broke."

I'm still attached to the brand somehow from my memories of the 1970s and early 1980s though, and so I am saddened by this news, but I also felt for decades that the brand is no longer what I remember and so the 1990s-2010s RadioShack is not really *my* RadioShack. Although, since I also went to RS together with my father, if he is not around now, it can't ever be the same in that sense, and my own kid has different interests in any case, sigh.

And of course there are also some bad memories from the 1970s-1980s of the difficulty of actually purchasing anything as they wanted your address and phone and so on for every tiny order; I guess it was a good exercise in eventually learning to say "no thanks" to such requests. :-) But even with that, it was a positive experience overall to have a place to go that somehow seemingly respected the tinkerer and the learner (even if it charged 2X for lesser components that what I later learned you could get mail order -- the cost of having a storefront I guess). Nowadays, makerspaces and online forums may be filling that need more. It's too bad RS could not connect better to that, even though they tried some at the end with Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

Sears faced the same sort of challenge tracking changing needs. With the history of the Sears mail order catalog, one might have expected that Sears should have dominated internet sales, but Sear's web presence was poor, and they lost that emerging space to Amazon. Likewise, one might have expected that, in theory, Radio Shack's online presence could have been what Make Magazine, AdaFruit, and so on became. Or why did RS not make something like the Raspberry Pi? Or the BeagleBone (which is from that group working with *Texas* Instruments)? So, some missed opportunities in leadership (in retrospect, which is easy to say with 20/20 hindsight).

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Yeah, sad for me too. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, with an interest in robotics and computers., my father and I would visit Radio Shacks to get various parts for my projects. ..."

I was tempted to follow creimer's example from that discussion and buy some stock or options hoping for a bounce, but I guess financially now I'm glad I didn't:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
"Radio Shack has been preparing for bankruptcy for years. There's nothing new in the WSJ report that haven't already been reported before. Radio Shack stock price dived to $0.26 this morning and climbing back up. I bought 80 shares @ $0.48 on Tuesday. I might buy more share later. This is a long shot bet that might triple or lose my money."

Still might have been fun just for the nostalgia though, like by getting the actual stock certificates. Sorry buying RS stock recently was apparently not profitable you, creimer. You might want to request the actual certificates and hope they become collector's items eventually? See:
http://www.investopedia.com/as...
"Before online brokers and personally-directed accounts, holding a physical stock certificate was a necessity, as this was the only way to authenticate stock ownership. This is not the case anymore. Although you may not need to hold a stock certificate, you may request one. The corporation you are holding stock in issues stock certificates, and you can get your certificate either directly from the issuing corporation, or by contacting your broker who may get the stock certificate on your behalf.
      Detailed on the stock certificate itself will be your name, the company's name and the number of shares you own. There also will be a seal of authenticity, a signature from someone with assigning authority authenticating the certificate and either a CUSIP or CINS number. Currently, stock certificates are seen more as collectibles and souvenirs than actual records of ownership.
    On the other hand, corporations may not have an interest in sending all shareholders stock certificates, although they are required to by law if requested. ..."

In any case, even if not totally unexpected, sad news...

Debugging code that prints or logs may act to synchronize access to some data structure. Sometimes that can prevent a deadlock or illegal pointer access as a side effect:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So yes, complex programs can act in strange ways from seemingly minor changes.

I spent a couple years helping maintain a large complex multi-threaded app (which included message passing between the apps, for another layer of fun) which supported 24X7 operations where a minute's downtime could cost millions of dollars in some situations, and it was not easy. The code base was easily 10X to 100X of what the poster of the story is tasked with maintaining. Versions of the code had been in production for over fifteen years. Much of the code had been ported from C++ & Tcl to Java (although C++/Tcl systems remained), but the threading model was somewhat different between the two, and the port had not taken account of all the differences. It would have been nice to be able to rewrite some key parts of the system to make them more maintainable, but there was never enough time for that in a big way -- and realistically, bigger rewrites likely introduce new issues. Still, eventually we got most of the worst deadlocks and memory leaks and similar such things fixed and the system got to the point where people stopped even remembering off-hand the last time a core part of the system needed to be rebooted (previously a fairly frequent event). But each deadlock could involve days, weeks, or even months of study and discussion, adding log statements, writing tests, lab tests, analyzing quite a few multi-gigabyte log files (and writing tools to help with that including visualizing internal message flow), and so on. And, same as you mention, hardware and OS issues could interact with it all, making some things hard to duplicate under virtual machines for developers. One thing is that to the end user, a system that is more stable may not look that different than one that is less so -- there are no new features, so it is not obvious what is being paid for.

Although obviously if the program you support core dumps from a bad address or stack overflow, rather than just freezes up, it is probably something else. Still, even then, a bad pointer address can sometimes come from one thread freeing a data structure when another thread is still using it. The original C++ in the above mentioned project generally was highly reliable, but it still had some odd issues too. In one rare case, memory was freed in an unexpected way under certain conditions by other code running in the same thread but in code nested way deep with essentially recursive calls processing complex messages. I finally also traced part of that too what looked like maybe a bug in a supporting third-party library (a RogueWave data structure). Because that C++ code had been in production for years, and we were loathe to change it at the risk of introducing new issues, we mostly "fixed" that issue by making changes elsewhere in the system to prevent that component from getting the pattern of data that it had trouble handling. But we would not have known exactly what to change elsewhere without a lot of analysis.

Sadly, just as we got it mostly working well, the new shiny thing of a mostly COTS system that did something similar came along to replace much of it (at a much bigger expense than maintaining the old, but granted with some nice new features).

As I saw someone else comment recently about a "stable" OS, the end user generally cares more about how much work a system lets them get done, not how "stable" it is. A reboot can be acceptable, depending on the situation and the alternatives, even if not desirable. Erlang code is probably the master at that approach of rebooting code when it fails. :-) Here is some related humor about Erlang and the "cost" of writing highly reliable software:
"The Ghetto"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So, if there are procedures in place to deal with known instabilities, it can be best to use work around in some situations.

Still, even then, it is good when possible to continue to research such issues depending on the context, because you never know if there may be more to them or if they might somehow produce even bigger problems down the road under different circumstances (like a change in load or hardware or message patterns or such). While budgets are always limited, depending on the situation, it can sometime still be much much cheaper to pay a skilled programmer to study some issue for a year to prevent downtime. For example, in the financial field, imagine if a real-time trading software stops working for a few minutes due to a deadlock and misses some big shift in the market -- a company could potentially lose hundreds of millions of US dollars sitting on the sidelines with fixed positions. And of course in fields like medicine or transportation, lives are on the line if systems stop working at certain key times.

Here is a good general resource on writing fault tolerant systems in terms of considering multiple layers of a "system":
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://resources.sei.cmu.edu/l...

Now I'm doing mostly JavaScript stuff in the Browser and NodeJS and Dojo, so not many thread deadlocks to worry about :-) -- just lots of other issues like Dojo's problematical documentation or NodeJS/V8 not running on older PowerPC cores like in my el-cheapo home NAS. But at least it all runs nice on a US$35 Raspberry Pi! :-) BTW, a small subset of what I've been working on lately that I just put up on Github:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

Good luck with the system you help maintain!

I guess the initial "dystopia" I painted in this video parable where everyone ends up in prison just to get food to survive after robots take all the jobs is even worse than anticipated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."

And of course, once you have AIs running the prisons and robot guards, who knows what they will do?

Good catch! OLPC lost a lot of developer mindshare IMHO when they started cosying up to Microsoft and changing their hardware to run Windows. Example:
http://www.olpcnews.com/softwa...
"For me, that paragraph represents the end of a dream. I say that XP on the XO is the end of One Laptop Per Child as an educational project. With a Microsoft operating system, an XO becomes a "$200 laptop", a cheap Toshiba replacement, not an educational learning tool for children. With the Sugar User Interface, OLPC can claim to have a Constructionist learning methodology, it can claim to be promoting exploration and learning, it can even hope to activate the view source key. But once you put on XP, no matter how much it may be customized to leverage the XO hardware, children will not be taught to "learn learning" as Negroponte promised. They will be taught "ICT skills", a phrase Negroponte himself railed against. Ministries of Education will be tempted to lock down XO's in computer labs and revert the whole one laptop per child idea back to one to many, effectively negating the goal of this grand dream. Yes, for me XP on the XO is the end of OLPC, no matter who is the CEO."

Hope Raspberry Pi does not suffer the same fate -- especially as I recently bought two B+ versions, :-) not knowing about either of these forthcoming changes (better hardware or Windows).

The last week or so, I've been watching for the new Beagleboard-X15, which is both open source hardware (Raspberry Pi design is not quite open hardware it seems) and will answer a lot of performance and memory issues at least compared to the Raspberry Pi B+ or the Beaglebone Black.
http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:...
http://beagleboard.org/project...
"The BeagleBoard-X15 is the newest member of the BeagleBoard family. Measuring 4" x 4.2", it is based on a Dual Core A15 processor running at 1.5GHZ and features 2GB of DDR3L Memory. It is in the beta phase. ... Guidance is that it is certainly over $100 ..."

So, that board is a lot pricier than this newer (or older) Raspberry Pi though. Not too much for a typical home office server use as an example (like to run NodeJS locally for testing on a separate non-VM box), but still 3X to 4X more for the board. However, when you add a case, extra media like a hard disk or big USB flash drive, and a power supply, and a wireless dongle, and so on, I doubt the overall cost is probably that much more than 2X for an entire system with the Beagleboard-X15.

By me: http://slashdot.org/submission...
"Caroline Murray reports for the Sacandaga Express: "Just this year, the Broadalbin-Perth Central School District completed Phase 1 of a plan to install high-tech security cameras in every school across the district. For the first time, high school and middle school students started off the school year with security cameras pointed at them from every direction, including hallways, staircases, and public rooms, such as the cafeteria and gymnasium. For some veteran students, the cameras feel a bit invasive. "It is like '1984' with big brother," senior Hunter Horne said while walking down the hallway. ... Superintendent Stephen Tomlinson said safety is the driving force behind the technology, however, admitted student behavior also plays a role in utilizing the equipment. Tomlinson said students have rights, and he wants to respect their privacy, but their rights change when students step foot on school grounds. ... Tomlinson said he already notices the culture has changed in the high school. He believes the amount of bullying and vandalism in the hallway is greatly reduced already. Gennett said faculty and teachers have peace of mind now, knowing the entire school is under surveillance. "It would be very difficult to find a location in our buildings where you can hide, or you can go, and intentionally do something that is not acceptable in our buildings," Tomlinson said. Some of the administrators view the security cameras as entertaining. Seniors Smith and Horne said certain staff members will call-out students over the loud speaker, and tell them to take off their hats."

One question not addressed in the article is whether forcing a child to submit to total one-way surveillance is a form of bullying or in some other way a vandalism of privacy or democracy? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society" for another take on surveillance, where all the watchers are also watched."

Original source: http://www.sacandagaexpress.co...

The inclusion of spending on "security" without any explanation of accountability or privacy issues is a reason I voted against the most recent New York State bond issue for educational technology in schools, as much as I am all for educational technology and also recognize the importance of security for all (the issue being how we go about ensuring security effectively in a broad sense).
http://ballotpedia.org/New_Yor...
"The New York Bonds for School Technology Act, Proposal 3 was on the November 4, 2014 ballot in New York as a legislatively-referred bond question, where it was approved. The measure authorized the state comptroller to issue and sell bonds up to the amount of $2 billion. The revenue received from the sale of such bonds are, according to the proposal, used for projects related to the following:[1]
* Purchasing educational technology equipment and facilities, such as interactive whiteboards, computer servers, desktop and laptop computers, tablets and high-speed broadband or wireless internet.
* Constructing and modernizing facilities to accommodate pre-kindergarten programs and replacing classroom trailers with permanent instructional space.
* Installing high-tech *security* [my emphasis] features in school buildings."

Helping raise kids well is what parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, village, tribe, churches of the better sorts, and extended community are for... We got along fine without compulsory schools up until the last 150 years or so...

So kids don't have to go it alone -- except, perhaps, that other forces in our society have greatly damaged parenting, family life, community and village life, and so on, making it harder for them to help kids grow well.

Just one example related to the problems cause by two-income families:
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy.""

For the beginnings of compulsory schooling in the USA, which Gatto said had to be enforced at gun point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"In the US, the American Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law which occurred in 1852."

Or, on the problems of compulsory schools from another perspective:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on early childhood education and the physical and mental development of children.
    They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores published their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[12] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement".[12]
    Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long-term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[12] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children, particularly special needs and impoverished children and children from exceptionally inferior homes[clarification needed], they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting. They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children -- when obviously most children already have even more secure housing.""

As for video games, I agree excessive screen time is problematical for any kid, but maybe we should make better (more educational) ones if kids like them so much? Again though, helping maintain a healthy balance is part of a larger social responsibility. Unfortunately, there is little accountability for people creating "supernormal stimuli" and all too many incentives to addict people to unhealthy things (whether games, food, videos, drugs, gambling, "therapy", or whatever). Some of the smartest minds in our society are paid some of the highest dollars to figure out ways to get kids to buy unhealthy crap to make more profits for those with a lot of capital. That is a tough force to put against a kid, even with parental supervision. Is it no wonder so many kids succumb? Perhaps this is part of a definition of "evil"? And it relates also to media deregulation that started under Carter and accelerated under Reagan. See the book "The War Play Dilemma" which talks about the unholy alliance of media producers, toy manufactures, and fast food makers who saturate kids 24X7 (even on their bedclothes) with stereotyped images.

Also, and I say this as someone who (along with his wife) put more than six person-years into writing an educational simulation in the 1990s, there has been precious little real support to make quality educational software -- unless it is tightly tied with raising children's grades in compulsory school, and even then still weak. There are exceptions (Kerbal Space Program? Khan Academy? Minecraft by accident? Space Engineers? Concord Consortium?), but overall, very little support relative to the need or desire to write such software. Still, it's true that more recently, there have been many good educational apps for cell phones and tablets, so some things are improving there, although I doubt most of these app makers are making enough money to support themselves (even if a handful no doubt do quite well). And then, on top of that, many granting agencies allow the few educational grant winners to make their works proprietary, this making them hard to build upon.

Most of the money for "Education" in our society gets sucked up by the compulsory school system or things closely linked to it. In New York State, an average of about US$20,000 per year is spent per compulsory schooled child. Just a fraction of that could otherwise pay for a heck of a lot of educational software and other educational materials for all under FOSS licenses. Think Khan Academy times 1000! And with that material being useable globally.

Also, US kids are unduly stressed from being forced to go to compulsory school, from the changes in cultural patterns preventing outdoor play (read "Last Child in the Woods" on "Nature Deficit Disorder") and interacting with neighboring kids, as well as other family stresses in the stagnant US economy (stagnant or declining take-home wages for decades for most workers, while expectations rise) which prevent parents and relatives and so on from spending more time with kids. These all contribute to an unhealthy environment that makes video games more appealing.

As a stereotype, how many adults come home from an overly stressful day at work and then turn on the TV and have a beer? So, kids come home from an overly stressful (even if just from boredom) day at school and play video games. Maybe the issue is more the nature of the workplace or the school?

Again, "The Moores published their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally and even physiologically." Think of it this way -- why should any parent be forced (at gunpoint) to allow his or her young child be adopted essentially by a state-selected single mother who already has twenty kids of the same age? But that is essentially the system we have now, although the "adoption" only covers most of a kid's waking weekday hours. So, we've got all these kids who according to research are damaged in all sorts of serious ways by compulsory schooling before age twelve, where their well-meaning school teacher "adoptive parent" has next to no time for them as one out of twenty or so other kids, and we then wonder why kids can't manage their own time or life well during or afterwards? Or why kids turn to video games or whatever including illegal drugs to deal with the stress or other resulting problems?

How did we let it get this way? Yet as Gatto says, every step made a sort of rational sense by itself...
http://www.homeschoolnewslink....
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, an historic part of the American genius. School had instead to train them for their role in the new over-arching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory-schooling."

BTW, if we are going to have schools, either the Albany Free School model (focusing on play and social/psychological development) or the one room school house of multiple ages all together (with older teaching younger, starting around age 10 or so, lasting a few years) makes a lot more sense and historically shows a lot more success at raising capable people for a democracy. However, better than all that for most of the time is parents and a local village with enough time to raise kids well...

To be clear -- I'm not against kids going to classes if they want, or kids hanging out with other kids of the same or different ages when they want, or making all of that tremendously easy to do -- including by putting 10X more money into our local public libraries for a start. I'm not against the state taxing the public and transferring money to families with kids to help the families and kids. I'm also not against parents choosing a private school for their kids if they want to do that and do other work instead. The issue is the compulsion and the state deciding instead of the family deciding what kids do during most of the day. Part of that issue is also the state instead of the family taking that US$20,000 a year and deciding how to spend it -- with, exaggerating but not much, the state generally choosing to spend it to support essentially single mothers with twenty same-aged kids.

For a family with two kids in New York State, that US$40,000 a year otherwise spent on compulsory school could allow one parent to stay home full-time with the kids, or could support world travel, or could pay for tutors, or could pay for many other educational experiences in local museums or local homeschool resource centers. But parents are not getting that choice regarding those funds. Still, it is true that homeschooling is currently legal in all 50 US states, although it is not legal in a lot of Europe. So, at least that is a start. Europe's school are less bad though, because in general the money follows the kid, and parents have much more choice of schooling including Waldorf, free schools, and so on, where any alternative school that can attract kids is assured of a decent revenue and decently paid teachers. By contrast, the Albany Free School can't pay its teachers much and also survives in part by some wise early investments in local real estate.

Sure, there will be failures by some families if families decide how to spend all that money -- and in those cases, the community may have to step in. But as the point above about tents suggests, most families, given enough resources, will do a better job of education than schools -- especially in today's internet age with ready access to any sort of educational material.

And public schools themselves produce oh so many failures in oh so many ways -- even including kids with straight A's.

See for example, on "A's":
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
"Both rewards and punishments, says Punished by Rewards author Alfie Kohn, are ways of manipulating behavior that destroy the potential for real learning. Instead, he advocates providing an engaging curriculum and a caring atmosphere âoeso kids can act on their natural desire to find out.â"

And on the problems resulting from grades:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
"Researchers have found three consistent effects of using â" and especially, emphasizing the importance of â" letter or number grades:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...
The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait â" thereâ(TM)s more. ..."

And even deeper issues:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."

There is another way to look at it. Using your figures, the total amount per US person is about US$142. That is for a ten year lease of the spectrum if I recall correctly, so we can expect a similar amount again in another decade. So, that is about US$14 per person per year during that time (well, a little more, with interest as the money if the money is received up front). For a family of four, that is about US$56 per family per year ignoring interest. That could be a month or two of cell phone service on a cheap plan -- or even half a year for one phone on a very cheap plan (like Ting's cheapest). Or, with the entire amount up front (US$560 per family), that could be the cost of an unlocked current smartphone or, say, two current Chromebooks, or, say, a Chromebook and a "FreedomBox" or such as a home server, or, say, a new Raspberry Pi educational kit every three years. Or it might just cover an otherwise-missed mortgage payment during the next decade. US$560 in various ways could make a *big* difference to a lot of lower middle class people living paycheck to paycheck on the edge in the USA.

Given that whoever got the spectrum will undoubtedly charge more for it given these up front costs, it seems only fair for families to get some money to offset those extra costs.

It's true though that some US states already have a free-to-the-user limited cell phone plan for very poorest people on Welfare, an one might argue in theory this money should also go to something like that -- but probably less fairly IMHO compared to a needs-blind cost, otherwise it becomes a hidden "tax" on everyone. I would argue that the current approach, to put the money to deficit reduction, is similarly just a hidden tax of US$560 on every US family -- where the tax for deficit reduction is paid by higher cell phone fees. Since the poorest people probably spend the greatest percentage of their income on cell phone service (which is becoming a necessity of mainstream US life), the plan to use the money to pay back the deficit is a terribly *regressive* tax as a way to pay back the deficit. This also ignores both that the deficit creates the US money supply and also that much of it can be considered to be underwriting problematical optional war spending like the Iraq war. So, rather than get US$560 in the family pocketbook, each US family instead sees a tighter money supply (so, higher credit card interest) and also probably yet more war spending since there was no real accounting for the previous spending (other than this new hidden cell phone tax).

Related:
http://costsofwar.org/article/...
"The increased military spending following 9/11 was financed almost entirely by borrowing."

As an aside, the theory of auctioning off (or "privatizing") the spectrum is probably based on some notion of "highest economic use", in the theory that whoever would pay the most for the spectrum would make the most use of it for the most benefit to the most people. But in reality, such auctions may just be putting resources in the hands of people (and their organizations) that may have the most capital (including trademarks and good will) and think they are best at "rent seeking" to extract the most money from the most people regardless of what they can deliver. Again, distributing the funds raised at least partially protects people from that -- however, it is still not enough in many cases. Ideas like the open WiFi spectrum are alternatives, and are helping a lot of people in a lot of ways. Other ideas include "ham" like regulations on the use of some frequencies.

Right now, almost everyone 65 or older (roughly) gets a basic income in the USA of about US$1000 - US$2000 per month via "Social Security" as well as health care via Medicare. Is that not significant? That makes a big difference to a lot of people and even their children. So, I feel it is hard to generalize that "Disbursement of government money to the masses doesn't really do much". Granted, that basic income is funded in a regressive way with fixed percentage payroll taxes capped at some limit that prevents them from affecting the very affluent.

As automation spreads (including wireless stuff), it is likely most human labor will have less and less economic value in the marketplace, because robots, AIs, and other automation will be cheaper and more reliable for most tasks most of the time -- even "creative" tasks. Thus we need more financial experiments in this direction IMHO, and this broadcast spectrum auction would provide a perfect opportunity to explore these alternatives. Instead, it looks like the result is another hidden war tax making it harder on the middle class to get by...

Other similar ways to fund such a basic income could include carbon taxes, fishery licenses, logging permits, mining permits, copyright fees, patent fees, import or export tariffs, fees for regulated stock transactions or similar big financial movements, fees for the first use of money in banks as it is created by the Federal Reserve, and so on... Even if each one is small, together they might add up to a lot.