When I was 11 I was hacking out 6502 assembly (using a couple of the 6510 extensions) on my C64. At 14 I was hacking out z80 code for my TI-85. Also did a little C and a bit of BASIC.

So I guess 80's era BASIC, Motorola assembler, mix in a little Zilog, add a dash of K&R and BAM! In 7 or 8 years, a professional programmer will take to the field!

1. Do whatever you have to to get the contract. Feeling out how to best manipulate and extract money from your client. If you have to undercut your best friend, be prepared to do it. Put your ethics on a shelf, the world isn't about them anyway.

2. Never do business with anyone you could not utterly destroy should the need arise. If a company is hiring a freelancer, chances are they are going to screw you. You need to be prepared to screw back, harder and deeper.

Really those two rules work in all dealings. If you cannot cause financial ruin to someone you are in an agreement with, you are not safe.

Airport security is a sham as is anyway. It's all just a show to make you feel safe. They'll, of course, have to detain, torture, and execute the odd innocent as a sign that the invisible force of knowing is working. Kind of like playing a "death lottery" every time you fly.

No, Computers are not something that "Do what we need", computers are deterministic finite automatons. They have a finite (though very large from a practical standpoint) set of states they can move through. All a programmer is doing is creating delta functions which move the automaton from one state to another. Worse yet, in modern digital computers, we encode the delta function into the machine's set of states (translation, programs are stored in memory). This gives rise to the notion that there is also a finite, though practically large, set of programs which can be written on/for any physical digital computer.

The idea of "usefulness" or "getting things done" is what we as users extrapolate from various visualization of these states. The computer itself is only changing its configuration. We establish meaning and function from that based on the context that we provide. So the real crux of this statement is we, as humans, use computers to perform useful tasks. Computers no more compute than screwdrives actually drive screws. It requires some interaction with a human for either to perform its function.

It seems their definition requires the ability to reflect on itself. In which case, it does not require a great deal of intelligence for a program to be able to do this. For instance, consider the following Turing Machine, let's call it M. M performs the following function:

    1. Receive an input N, which is a string encoding of a TM.
    2. Accept if N is a string encoded representation of M.
    3. Reject otherwise

Such a TM would be easy to implement in any programming language. Obviously, it would contain within itself some method of comparing encoded strings to its own encoding. It would be able to reflect on itself very deeply. In fact, how many of us when presented with a complete map of neurons could successfully say "Yes, that's my brain" or "No it is not"?

Does that mean that the TM has a soul? Does it mean that we do not?

Perhaps I've been writing too many computation theory proofs of late, and need to play more video games, but it is still interesting, don't you think?

the user name ltorvalds. It tends to ensure that my patches are accepted at a higher rate. In fact, I get a higher acceptance rate than when I use my other screen name, rMs