I would argue that developing forms of robotics for the battlefield (autonomous or not) has a huge potential to reduce hostility. Decision making on the battlefield in person has to take into consideration enemies, civilians and friendlies, and a naturally increased hostility is present due to the personal risk involved. With robots you can forget about the personal risk forget about friendlies and concentrate on separating civilians from hostiles, it makes combat one dimension simpler.
Also robots can be sent into situations that would be suicidal, plain immoral, or not physically possible for human soldiers... go down this street with enemies hiding amongst civilians and don't shoot until you get really close because your more likely to kill a civilian, that's not really a situation you can send a human into successfully without ether huge risk to civilians or a huge risk to friendlies.
It's a sharp tool that can be used far more accurately than a blunt one such as a bomb. Something that is likely to stop stupid military decisions like preemptive strikes with massive civilian casualties, because there is another option.
I'm not saying i trust the hands of whoever these tools end up in, but the potential for good is as great as the potential for bad as with most technology.
O_o strange, thanks for pointing it out. I was repeating what i read from Wikipedia on the BSD page a long time ago, but it appears to still be there: BSD
[...]These, in turn, have been incorporated in whole or in part in modern proprietary operating systems, e.g. the TCP/IP (IPv4 only) networking code in Microsoft Windows and a part of the foundation of Apple's OS X.
Where does this myth come from then, and how did it end up being passed of as fact on wikipedia? perhaps you could correct it for us being as you know the whys and hows. I'm being sincere, no sarcasm here
Wow, never new that info was retained in the sources, interesting
Yeah i was a bit confused at the temporary switch in 2006 - 2007 in the timeline that suggested Darwin was the main development branch... i always viewed Darwin as the excerpt that Apple occasionally kept up to date.
Reciting it however doesn't make you any less unreasonable than your government.
Many politicians are completely blind to the difference between Laws, Morality, and Reason, using the former as a synonym for both the later, they are not able to entertain hypothetical thinking about law, because they are ether unable or unwilling to question them. Don't be as single minded as those people, your government is no more concrete than mine.
I had a look through this timeline tracing from the origin at NeXTSTEP 0.8, and now my brain is slightly melted O_o... but I managed to find all of the inheritance from other systems (excluding integrations between derivatives of itself like Darwin, OS X Server, OS X and iOS etcetera):
So it looks like mostly FreeBSD and a little of the old Mach, I think NetBSD was used as a means for porting between architectures more than a literal inheritance. interesting how the last bit of FreeBSD was way back in 2004 from FreeBSD 5 (The timeline goes all the way up to present with OS X Mavericks). of course there are probably newer bits of FreeBSD used that are only known internally to Apple.
Not having looked this closely at the OS X part of this timeline before i found the transition between OPENSTEP and OS X quite confusing... according to the timeline Rhapsody (what OPENSTEP turned into after Apple started working on it) directly became Mac OS X Server and Darwin, but OS X was not derived from any of them itself and seems to be directly linked to Mach 3.
Then the timeline proceeds with Mac OS X as what appears to be where all of the development is taking place (including inheriting from FreeBSD), with Darwin and OS X Server only ever taking from OS X like mirrors. Then suddenly in 2006 this model changes and the OS X 10.5 beta inherits from Darwin 9.0 beta, when OS X 10.5 and Darwin 9 mature the model goes Darwin -> Mac OS X -> Mac OS X Server... Then in 2007 during the OS X 10.7 beta the model changes again when the server branch is eradicated all together and gets integrated into OS X and OS X gets integrated into Darwin so the model goes OS X -> Darwin again but without the server.
This suggests OS X didn't inherit from Rhapsody at all until the period between 2006 and 2007, not sure if this is true or not, but interesting none the less. Also makes you wonder how much of the original OPENSTEP was inherited, perhaps it's more that it was not publicly disclosed how much of the technologies became proprietary Apple technologies at the beginning of OS X rather than a lack of direct inheritance at the beginning.
[...]If you did think it was important, you wouldn't be trivializing it in the face of an issue that has little to no bearing on American citizens. (Failing that, then it's as I stated earlier: You argue just to argue.)
Part of the reason the leaks have caused so much concern, is due to the NSA's activities extending far beyond the borders of America. However poverty is defined and whether or not it is an issue in America, it's likely to be an issue in other parts of the world that the NSA's influence extended to.
I'm not siding with girlintraining's opinion, because I happen to think that a single very powerful entity with massive global surveillance operations and potential influence over the world's information is a very dangerous idea that could gravely impact the future of everyone in the world. However I would hope that others would also consider the morality and implications of the NSA's operations beyond their back yard, the location of your countries borders shouldn't have any bearing on the way you value one abstract social ethic against another... Especially since we are talking about the internet and the NSA here.
This is getting slightly off topic, but it is interesting how FreeBSD code finds it's way into so many other systems, but not too surprising when you consider the fairly widespread opinion of it's high code quality and statistically proven fewest bugs per lines. Darwin has already been mentioned and probably has the closest resemblance. You can also include the AT&T UNIX systems and their many derivatives which have all pulled code from the BSDs into their source tree's at various points, important to note that the literal code inheritance for the 386 derived BSDs of today is BSD -> UNIX and not the other way around, I know i make that point a lot
If you include not only the systems that maintain a fuller closer resemblance to the original FreeBSD userland then smaller components of FreeBSD are likely to have been included in many systems that we aren't aware of... probably the most unlikely that most people would think of is windows, it's TCP/IP stack is derived from FreeBSD. But the same is probably true for GNU, so it's not really useful to try to compare how widely used they are, it's just good that both of them have liberal enough licensing to be so useful in so many different things.
We should teach them if they like it... I taught myself and am teaching myself to code because i like it, i'm not very good at it yet but i'm learning to be better, and most people who really like something have the care and motivation to better themselves and do well at that thing.
For most people, things that are forcibly taught are taken no further than the explicit level of proficiency required to pass whatever test awaits them at the end of the teaching period. And after that, many details and insights of what was taught fades away.
However If it is voluntarily, then not only will the teaching be more effective, but it will form a basis for the person to likely excel by themselves far beyond the proficiency attained by the explicit teachings.
Of course this can apply to anything, but just as much to code. If and when i have a child and i find that coding sparks their curiosity then i will most certainly help them learn about it, but i would never force them to learn it, because once they are not interested it becomes pointless, and energy would be better spent on helping them to learn about whatever else interests them other than chocolate bunny rabbits and video games. It's not even really important if they end up using it, i just think that nurturing curiosity and self learning is very valuable because that's where someone will always learn and enjoy the most, it's a delicate balance trying to teach someone but not kill their curiosity at the same time. The question of an appropriate age is something better answered by someone who has a good understanding of the development of the brain.
It's like eating an elephant: take one bite at a time. Pick a little bit that you think you can tackle and have a go at it. Then take on another bit. And another. Don't be afraid to go back and redo if you find out you're wrong; everyone's wrong sometimes, you've just got to try again.
Well that sort of matches what i've been doing so far which is good.
Initially in complex designs i was naively and iteratively re-writing the whole thing which was painful and brief thankfully. Then eventually iteratively re-writing modules after identifying the dependancy of modules upon other modules and building a hierarchy of dependence with the roots of that hierarchy as the most important parts that must be well defined and complete before delving into successive levels, but then of course some prior knowledge of the workings of the higher level modules and even their existence is still needed to determine the spec of the lowest level modules so it seems that some kind of prototyping or experimentation is required on larger projects.
That's what i've deduced thus far and hopefully that's not too far off what a professional might call along the lines of good basic design, but I was just wondering if there exists some well established theories and models that i could study in the form of a good book. I agree with what you say about when to teach it but there must be some material to teach surely, otherwise theres some much needed text that an accomplished programmer needs to get writing.
Don't follow the crowd--or your favorite crowd. Think for yourself.
I don't know where you drew that conclusion from but i assure you i follow no crowd. Anyway, throughout your response you seem to have missed my key point. So i'll try to make myself a bit clearer and more explicit, and then you can see if it changes your argument.
I wasn't simply announcing the principle of verification as some kind of Indoctrination, i was analysing it's assumptions to make my key point in relation to the existence of God which is: to question the origin of ones proposition. Also you seem to have misinterpreted the principle of verification and much of the source of your argument stems from there, so that seems like a good place to begin:
The essence of your interpretation:
....that anything which cannot be empirically proven to exist must not exist
This is not what verificationism proposes... it proposes that if it cannot be proven or disproven then it is meaningless, not that it is true or false (it can be ether, but it must be possible to find it to be true or false). Now what i was asking is, although it sounds reasonable, why should a proposition be meaningless in that case (whether it's to do with God or anything else for that matter). To answer that, consider these statements and my analysis of them:
(A) There exists an unknown quantity of "things" that we do not yet know.
(B) There also exists an an unknown quantity of "things" that we will never know and never be able to prove or disprove because they are unreachable and cannot affect us in any way.
(C) There are also "things" that are fabrications of the human mind that do not exist other than in the realm of human imagination.
These three statements are logically sound and true. now lets determine each of their classifications by verificationism:
(A) by definition is within our capability to know, so any proposition that fits this category is verifiable, there for it is classified as meaningful.
(B) by definition we can never know, any proposition that fits this category is unverifiable, there for it is classified as meaningless.
(C) by definition can be anything we imagine that is also false, some of these fabrications are grounded in reality and verifiable, others are misconceived or intentionally fictitious and to far removed from reality to be verifiable, propositions from this category can be ether meaningful or meaningless respectively.
A classic example of a "meaningful" verifiable case of C is the pseudoscience "Homeopathy" which was irrefutably disproven.
So how does the meaningful classification of verificationism relate to my point about questioning the origin of a proposition?.. propositions from all of the above categories are borne out of imagination, but the origin of that imagination (the effect that caused it) can be different. Proven propositions (in category A) are caused by the same phenomenon affecting us directly or indirectly. Disproven propositions (in category C) can be caused by a phenomenon affecting us in category A... think placebo (A) and homeopathy (C). Now look at category B... It is not possible to be affected by a "thing" in category B, by definition, therefor the cause of any proposition that unwittingly fitted the description of a "thing" in category B could not have been from the same truth that it proposes (this is the essence of my point). Unverifiable propositions in category C are essentially the same with the omission of the "thing".
So the meaningless classification attributes to verifiability and by extension the relationship between the cause of a proposition and it's proposed truth. By the logic that if it is unverifiable, there can be no effect to measure which means there can also be no effect to cause for the proposition in the first place, which means the cause did not originate from the proposed truth. The probability of a misconceived proposition to be true would be equally unknown as an unverifiable intentional fiction.
So what i am actually saying is that it's possible "God" does exist, but being unverifiable means it's truth has an unknown probability and so does my apparently provocative spaghetti monster (my unverifiable intentional fiction). I made up something as absurd as the spaghetti monster to illustrate my point that both it and "God" can be considered equally likely to exist or not exist because they are both unknowns.
Chemist who falls in acid is absorbed in work.
