If you are trying to explain why we haven't detected any aliens, how is "they were massacred by even more advanced aliens" a remotely adequate answer? That just leaves you with "why haven't we detected the even more advanced aliens?". The question was never "why do we detect so many deathbots and so few little green men?"

If anything, superintelligences are presumably more capable of doing high-visibility things(if they want to) by virtue of being more advanced; and, while they could all be carefully hiding because they're paranoid that same explanation would hold for standard aliens as well.

Seems like an awful lot of hypothesis to explain nothing.

Football: ball is tossed around using feet.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

Barbara Streisand tried to sue some guy who took pics of her backyard from a helicopter like 20 years ago. She lost. Technology may change but many of the concepts don't.

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.

I'd agree that a production system that actually relies on actual floppies would be rolling the dice in a deeply uncomfortable way at this point; but I'm a little puzzled by the extent of the fuss given that(admittedly, more for hobbyist and niche stuff, retrocomputers and synths from the floppy era, that sort of thing) the practice of emulating floppy drives is quite well established and, thanks to the age and (low) speed of the busses in question, pretty technically undemanding.

If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.

that the end game for every NEW, BETTER version of Windows is to find out how to put more spyware, ads, and DRM in my OS and NOT to improve the functionality of an OS which is to run applications. I don't need to PAY MS money just so they can further invade my privacy and try to extort more money from me. If you're gonna bend me over at least take me to dinner first.

Even if the history of Russian 'import substitution' weren't littered with farces where someone gets a gold star for domestically producing tractors...from imported Polish kits with the serial numbers filed off...or the like; "game console" seems like a strikingly hard target, especially relative to its value.

It's a consumer product, rather than the state or state owned or heavily influenced companies being the customer, so there's a lot less leverage in terms of just making 'domestically produced' patriotic and mandatory; and it's a toy that only some people are even interested in, so it's even more difficult to distinguish between people who don't buy Super Motherland 3 because they just don't play video games and ones who don't buy it because they are playing Genshin Impact on something imported from China or a cracked copy of CoD on the wintel they say they use for work. Obviously possible, if you wanted to divert even more statesec guys from keeping an eye on planned terrorist attacks in order to do traffic analysis to look for game pirates; but not obviously worth the trouble.

It's also a pretty demanding category: customers tend to be pretty cost-sensitive and tend to expect frankly remarkable levels of hardware and software punch that are deliverable only thanks to mass production at all levels(whether you are talking ICs, game engines, asset packs, or very large numbers of sales of the final product). This isn't some military thing where you'd like more; but it's workable, and arguably worth it, to be able to reliably deliver domestic clones of some 20-year-old TI DSP even at twice the market price. Unless you are running a crackdown on the alternatives that would make North Korea blink that's not going to work on the gaming side: expectations are high and prices are low; and 'good enough' is defined in large part relative to what other people have, rather than to specific requirements.

Look at the salaries for generally competent software developers of any experience level in the UK. Now look in the US. It's not hard to see why our industry lags in the UK.

Look at the tax system that applies to employees in the UK. The scale in effect has massive increases in marginal tax rates part way along the curve that mean it's not a progressive system, for no sensible reason. It's even worse if you have kids, when at some points on the curve a huge proportion of any pay rise never actually reaches you in practice, or in extreme cases you can even be worse off after a pay rise, because of the strange ways that various allowances work.

Now look at the massive increases in effective taxation that have been applied to founders and owner-operators of small businesses in recent years. We're talking about 10-20% more of your revenues getting eaten by taxes before you get to keep any profits. In many cases you can now give up all the security and benefits of full-time employment (which are much better in the UK than the US, remember) and potentially invest your own money into bootstrapping your business, but then even if it works out modestly successful you end up paying higher tax rates than someone else taking a salary. Again, not hard to see why we're lacking in entrepreneurs.

Look at the flexible workforce. Contractors and freelancers in the UK live under a perpetual sword of Damocles called IR35 that has all but killed off the real flexible labour market in recent years and means even "contractors" are really being treated as disguised employees by default and again would probably be better off taking a permanent salaried position to get the extra job security and benefits. And given the difference in salaries as mentioned above, obviously some of the good people are then going to take their skills elsewhere.

None of this is news but successive governments have just stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the problems affecting smaller businesses, not just in tech but across other industries from healthcare to logistics as well. It's like they haven't noticed that there are 1,000 SMEs for every enterprise giant and collectively the SMEs create more jobs, pay more taxes, make more useful products... And then someone in government acts all surprised that our tech industry is lagging. Well, duh.

At least on initial inspection "bespoke teams" and "long-term collaboration" sounds like they will be at odds with one another:

I'm curious whether the assumption is just that people who aren't the author are fungible cogs to be picked up and discarded with as much 'agility' as possible; or if they believe that first-time authors getting decent sized advances is an inefficiency and they seek to rectify that by ensuring that authors who don't sell can be discarded at minimal cost; just with a less-depressing focus on the part where authors who do sell do get paid.

In that case, they could indeed be walking on dangerous ground here if they haven't removed/replaced those parts of the code. Do you know what licence the Eclipse-derived code was used under? Someone mentioned AGPL above but Eclipse also has its own licence that isn't obviously compatible with the AGPL terms.

I did read what you actually wrote. Perhaps it doesn't come across the way you were hoping.

You appear to be insinuating some correlation between developers who choose to use safer languages and developers who have low skills and don't care about the quality of their work. Frankly, that looks like a straw man you've invented to try to create some controversy here, because IME conscientious developers tend to be the quickest and most enthusiastic adopters of safer tools. They'd probably still be safer than average developers using any other language, but they choose tools that make them even safer where they have that option.

No, it doesn't. You have misunderstood how these licences work.

Before you dig the hole any deeper, perhaps you would like to review what the relevant licences actually say? I linked to the GPL v2 in an earlier comment, but the provisions in other FOSS licences typically work on the same basis as well.

Then perhaps you would like to post a reply citing the specific wording from any of those licences and the contractual relationship you believe exists between the copyright holder and any licensee that would impose any obligations of the kind we're discussing on the copyright holder?

But the copyright holder isn't themselves subject to the kinds of terms we're talking about in a FOSS licence, because they don't require a licence to copy or distribute the content in the first place.

For example, GPLv2 says:

Obviously that doesn't apply to the copyright holder, who by definition does have the right to modify or distribute without needing the licence.

This is simply not how either copyright or contract law works in any jurisdiction with which I am familiar. You are exactly the hypothetical person in FOSS community I was describing.