The vast majority of physical systems exhibit classical behavior at classical scales, and brains function as best we know at a VERY macro scale - on the level of cortical "minicolums" (hundreds of neurons) rather than anything less.

Before wasting time designing impossibly complex experiments to see if the brain is operating deterministically, let's first see is anyone can observe a single neuron not obeying the laws of classical physics...

I also think that the term "deterministic" is being used rather loosely in this thread... it's being used not not a matter of classical (=deterministic) vs quantum or randon, but rather one of physical vs dualistic (spiritual/free will).

Any possible proof of the determinism of the human brain would first require that we come to a complete understanding of the chemical and biological processes that control human thought in addition to how environmental and genetic factors influence those internal processes. I think this particular question will stay in the realm of philosophy rather than science for an extremely long time.

Why would the determinism of the human brain (or of anything subject to the laws of physics) be in question. The fact the the brain is extremely complex and that our subjective experience is that of "free will" is irrelevant... at the end of the day our brain (and the rest of us too) is just a big old chunk of biochemistry, and operates per the laws of physics just like anything else. We don't need to prove it's deterministic since we a priori know that it must be.

Of course, our behavioral responses and thoughts are a highly non-linear (chaotic) function of our sensory inputs and (forever changing as a result of experience) brain wiring (synapses), so our behavior appears non-deterministic (or more accurately, often hard to predict), but so does the bahavior of any chaotic system (e.g the weather).

Robots are no different that humans in that respect - their behavior will always be deterministic, but will be chaotic and difficicult/practically impossible to predict to the extect that we've given them brains with similar levels of complexity and experience-driven plasticity as our own. The robots of the future will surely be a lot more like us than like a roomba vaccum cleaner.

Decent programming skills are a requirement for a software developer, but only one of many skills required. Given how many people lie about their experience and fail *VERY* simple interview programming tests, having a programming test screening procedure wouldn't be a bad thing, but only to drop the worst, not to automatically hire the best.

OK - Thanks.

I guess reference counting would work in those situations too.

An alternative to GC would be an STL replacement with reference count-based destruction.

I don't have a problem with the standard allowing for garbage collection, but I'm curious what types of real-world use cases make GC for C++ more convenient that explicit storage management?

The combination of STL and destructors-free-memory (on the frew occasions you need non-STL datastructures) seems convenient enough to me.

Unless you have the money and management experience to start a company, hire developers, etc, then the technology that you'd hypothetically use is irrelevant. OTOH if you do have the money to hire developers with the right skills then the problem will solve itself.

The notion of not having the money or management skills but somehow bootstrapping yourself up from nothing is almost certainly not going to happen. Even those who did start major companies without venture capital did so by borrowing significant money from family and friends, and only succeeded because they also happened to have the management skills.

Creating a successful start-up is more (or ALL) about having the right people than the right idea. In fact, the various start-up incubators are happy to fund the right people even if they don't have an idea, and many/most start-ups, if eventually successful, don't end up with the same company/product idea they originally started out with. You man think you know what the world needs, but the world will tell you if your right or not, and you'll only be successful if you adapt.

If you have the right stiff to create a startup then I think your best bet is to apply to a start-up incubator that will finance you and hook you up with the right people, but they are mostly looking for teams rather than individuals.

First off, don't install Linux (or anything you want to experiment/play with, for that matter) directly on your hard drive. Instead, download VirtualBox (a free, excellent, Virtual machine), then install Linux inside that.

If you do it this way, then:

a) You don't need to reboot to switch between Linux and Windows (the virtual machine just appears as another Windows app, although you cna full screen it if you want to)

b) If you mess up your Linux installation by experimenting, then your machine still works. You can even save your Linux installation at any point (e.g after installing a bunch of stuff), and get back to that saved point if you mess it up.

As far as which flavor of Linux - you want something simple to manage that works out of the box. When you gain experience with Linux in general then maybe try different versions. I recommend you start with Linux Mint - It's based on Ubuntu has a decent user interface ("Mate" or "Cinnamon" out-of-the-box, unlike recent versions of Ubuntu which come with a default tablet-centric user interface that you'll want to replace if you want to use it on a laptop/desktop.

Contemporary newspaper reports (85+ of them!), including that from an eye-witness, Chief Editor of the Bridgeport Herald, says it took off from a flat surface:

http://www.janes.com/products/janes/defence-security-report.aspx?ID=1065976994

From the Jane's article:

Secondly, as was only disclosed much later, under sanction of a Freedom of Information request by Senator Lowell Weicker Jr, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington - undisputed repository of American aviation history - secured possession of the precious Wright Flyer No. 1 from surviving brother Orville only after agreeing in a legally-binding document that "the Smithsonian shall [not state] any aircraft...earlier than the Wright aeroplane of 1903...was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight". History is normally written by researchers who have dispassionately analysed all relevant data and not, as here, by the lawyers of interested parties.

2. you lose context -- where did that "file not found" error originate from

Well, the main solution to that is of course to choose the appropriate scope of your try-catch blocks, but on occasion I've also found use for something as simple as:

string where;
try {
    where = "doing A";
    A;
    where = "doing B";
    B; // etc
} catch (...) { // print where
}

I don't see any need to differentiate between man-made environmental change (e.g. availability of cancer treatments) and other.

In the current environment having a genetic tendency to get cancer isn't as much of an evolutionary pressure as it used to be, so this is more of a semi-benign trait that is being accumulated. This still fits into the punctuated equilibrium pattern...

In a massive study on genetic variation among humans, researchers found that most changes have occurred in the last 200 generations, too fast for natural selection to catch up.

This statement appears to reflect a misunderstanding of how evolution plays out in practice.

The way evolution is often taught is that the small genetic changes in each generation make a difference to the evolutionary fitness (relative to his/her peers) of the individual right away, but that the changes are so small that it takes very many generations to see divergence of sub-populations of the species and hence noticeable evolutionary change.

The reality of evolution - "puntuated equilibrium" - is different from this simplistic teaching model. What really happens is that genetic changes accumulate over very many generations but don't have much if any immediate effect on evolutionary fitness since in practice these small, incremental, personal changes are often not what drives evolution. What really drives evolution (per the inference of the fossil record) is when the *environment* (weather, food supply, disease, competitors, etc, etc) changes, often very quickly, causing accumulated genetic change to suddenly become relevant... what had previously been a benign genetic change (disease resistance or susceptibility, etc, etc) no suddenly becomes a huge change in evolutionary fitness in the new environment, and and the fate of different genetic subpopulations becomes very differnt (we see visible divergence).

This is "punctuated equlibrium" - long spans of no visible evolutionary change (equilibrium) are puntuated by brief spans of rapid visible change as accumulated genetic drift suddenly becomes relevant due to environmental change.

So... the notion of 200 generations being too quick for "natural selection to keep up" is bogus. Natural selection mosltly doesn't happen every generation - it only happens when those infrequent major environmental changes occur.

3-7" of rain would be fine if it was all nice and spread out and just soaked into the ground, but water has a nasty habit of flowing downhill and finding its way into rivers...

The local river in northern NJ here raised its level by at least 10' during last years storm, resulting in the local highway being under 4' of water.

OK, so you need to hire a decent professional engineer to design your hearing aid. This isn't a DIY project. We get it.

That one-off expense is no excuse for the cost.

For about five years I ate the exact same thing - pasta, with store-bought sphag. sauce - for supper every day. Once every couple of months I would get tired of it and make something else, then back to pasta.

I used to think maybe I was a bit odd doing this, until I found out that Jay Leno does the same thing!

I did this because food really isn't important to me, and the time to shop and cook was a big waste - I'm sure you can save more time and mental energy by doing this than just by not having to choose which shirt to wear every morning!

Nowadays I have a more varied diet partly because I'm married and my wife does most of the cooking, but we still only have a relatively small number of dishes that we cook (maybe 10-12).