Seeing software problems in terms of Flying Spaghetti Monsters? Ah, so that's where the "spaghetti code" term comes from!

There is one difference, on which I based my post. None of those previous inventions that caused all the changes you outlined were made by the very same people whose jobs were in turn being obsoleted. They were usually made by hired engineers paid by managers who wanted their companies to generate more profit with less cost. The engineers had so much to do with the job of the people they were replacing with machines as to be able to design and deploy a control system tailored to the task, and no more. Some might have had a doubt or two, but they were paid good money and their job was very secure. The managers couldn't care less.

This is not the case with AI (the kind described in the article), where the direct inventor will be explicitly making himself obsolete and, being someone smart enough to invent a superhuman-level AI, should be able to realise this.

The only way I can see this happening is when said engineer happens to be a delusional madman who just doesn't care, but that's very close to a James Bond-esque vilian, so not very likely.

I don't know what kind of experts and in what field those actually were, but if I were an AI expert about to create such an AI - and I'm able to see the problem and the remedy even though I'm not really an expert of any kind - I'd say "screw it, if it's going to take my job, and jobs of my friends, family and all my descendants, I'm making it a complete dimwit and swearing by all I know that it was impossible to design otherwise, and putting that in every single book and publication on the topic!"

http://xkcd.com/684/

Sorry,couldn't resist...

98.27% Windows. 70.82 of that is XP, 17.25% is Vista, 10.77% Win 7, then 2000, Server 2003 and 98, all three in sub-percentages.

1.21% Linux
0.24% "not set"
0.21% Mac

In addition: 9 people (sub-promile amount) on an iPhone, 8 on Symbian, 5 on an iPod (WTF?...), 2 on an Android, 2 on some WebTVs or something.

Might be gaming bias, non-Windows gamers are rare in general. HoMM games mostly work on Wine, and there was a native Linux port of HoMM3 (without add-ons and incomatible with Windows versions in online play, quite useless today), but still, that's not mainstream by any measure.

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds. There's a group of about 60 of those, with 20-30 visiting on any given day, and the rest are mostly kids who just bought HoMM5 at an electronics store because the box was shiny enough, or adults with jobs and families who fire up the good, ol' HoMM I, II or III once a month or so for an hour to bring back the memories of college all-nighters.

A news site would probably be better for a non-biased sample, but I consider my statistics good enough, especially with such a huge difference.

If you don't speak Polish, it won't be of much use to you. If you do, you probably know it already, and if not, you should be able to find it using Google in no time.

Besides, I'm not taking my chances by putting a link up on /., I'm not *that* confident in my database optimization skills.

I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on /., and now I see the trend continue.

I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:

January 2008:
53.58% - Firefox
31.19% - IE
13.83% - Opera

January 2009:
60.99% - Firefox
23.99% - IE
12.32% - Opera
2.10% - Chrome

January 2010:
60.33% - Firefox
16.12% - Opera
15.29% - IE
6.24% - Chrome

Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.

Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?

An Asymptote script should be able to do that. It's both a data representation language and a programming language, similar to LaTeX in principle, but resembling C++ in syntax. It doesn't support shebangs , so you'd have to invoke the intepreter explicitly (or write some kind of a wrapper attached to the begining of a file), but it does provide a mechanism for reading from standard input, and any other file, for that matter. Take a look at the histogram.asy example file provided with Asmptote.

Don't be so harsh, there surely is some reliable information out there. Of course, there still remains the problem of finding it, a process which, even with aid of a search engine, most closely resembles searching for diamonds in a septic tank with a single pair of rubber gloves and a ladle...

I prefer the Python interactive shell and GNU Octave (or any other Matlab-compatible environment, including Matlab itself) for numerical calculations, Asymptote for plots and other methods of data visualisation, Maxima when a CAS is in order and LaTeX to turn all the stuff generated by those packages into something readable and publishable.

Throw in some scripted links between all those tools, a few functions from Peter Acklam's Matlab Utilities, your favourite function for converting a matrix to a LaTeX table and saving it into a file in a single call, a few exec()-equivalents here and there, and you'll get a rig that auto-regenerates your report/publication/thesis/shopping list/whatever else you might have been doing, in a single run of a single program, should you spot a mistake somewhere deep in the calculations, or a typo in the input.

For one, I don't think I'll ever understand people who use spreadsheets. And copy their results to the word processor. And then spot a mistake in a formula, fix it and proceed to copy the new, correct results from scratch. And then spot a typo in the data.

Why biased? Well, I'm studying control systems and robotics. It's all about task automation. Besides, everything in this field involves using Matlab for something, and just about everyone in the academia (the technical side of it, at least) is using LaTeX, so you just kind of get used to using those two for just about anything after a while, and automating everything with scripts.

Of course, the above assumes somtheing more complicated than a few basic operations in a single line. We're talking about sophisticated calculators here. For simple tasks I'm just using Google...

The Japanese are probably the single most proactive nation in the world when it comes to the aging of population and proper care of the elderly, and this invention has some very obvious uses in this field. Coupled with a caretaker robot which would remind about medicines, schedule appointments with a doctor and call emergency services as appropriate, this device might actually improve the quality of life of some people considerably. Interestingly, such robots are already being tested in Japan, and they are also designed to relay local news, play logic- and memory-based games and engage in everyday chitchat with the people under their care to delay the onset of dementia and effects of boredom.

The question is, do they have an audible reverse gear warning like european trucks?

Oh my, that's really an awful case of stuttering...

When George Mallory, the guy who attempted to climb Mount Everest several times (and almost succeeded, though the most successful attempt was also fatal in the end), was asked why exactly would he try to climb it, as it was extremely dangerous and he wasn't even a scientist or a cartographer, he said one simple thing.

"Because it's there."

Sure, there probably are some practical purposes for a version of Debian running the FreeBSD kernel, but whatever those might be, I think it's not a matter of "what for" but of "why", and this in turn is answered by the aforementioned quote.

Someone wanted to do that, probably just for the heck of it, someone else thought that it might be fun, they joined their efforts and did it. A good part of the whole FLOSS and academic research worlds works like that. Nothing wrong with that, IMHO.