When we stop belittling of half of earth's population down to the level of a bedroom/stove/pushchair accessory from their early teens
It starts earlier than that. Little girls are given pushchairs and toy food preparation equipment at the age of about three.
But this does very much depend on what one might mean by "super intelligent". I don't think we're in danger of ever producing a human-like intelligence, but I don't think the AI-kills-us-all scenario really requires one. Just some robots that are "intelligent" enough to co-operate, fly around, recognise us from the air, and kill us.
They're already building them. I'm not certain I see it ending well.
don't have any buttload of free time anymore to go exploring new music.
There has literally never been any time in all of human history better for discovering new music than now. Bandcamp. Youtube. Soundcloud. And many others I'm sure I've never heard of. And it has never been easier to record and disseminate music than it is today.
But those tend to be few and far between in the top 40.
Sure. But they are there, and anyone who likes to bang on about how they hate all pop music is just a snob.
Mostly chart music is rubbish, sure. But there are always gems in there, and it's worth listening to for that reason.
Having it incessantly played in stores is another thing altogether though. That is annoying, and when Christmas rolls around it's next to impossible to stay in the store for ten minutes at a time.
Oh how dull. Someone who hates a particular kind of music, and idly threatens violence.
a committed technophobe
You really aren't much of a technophobe if you own a smartphone, now are you? Not that there's anything wrong with that, just saying.
It's easy to abuse the position of spending other people's money to support something as nebulous and subjective as art
No it isn't. It's extremely hard, and is fought for every time these things come up for review.
Personally I'd consider the world to be better off without much of modern art, by what right are my taxes spent on such things?
They used to say the same thing about Matisse. Or they would have, if grants had been around then. In any case, the amount of money spent on the arts is microscopic when compared against any other public spending. It's pretty cheap, and it's good for everybody.
Today though we've created the strange idea that an musician should be able to record their music once, and get paid for it repeatedly over the course of the next century
I have often thought the same thing. But if the company I worked for was not able to charge, over and over again, for the software that I write once, then the company would not exist, and I would be out of a job. There's nothing wrong with expecting payment for a copy of your performance. Not for a century thereafter, sure, but for a reasonable period of time. Twenty years seems reasonable.
To be honest, if your loop structure is that deep then you'd be better off refactoring the code into a function that performs the inner loop or loops. This is quite likely to make the code easier to read anyway. I've never written code with a triple-nested loop and found myself needing to break out of the inner loop, straight into to the outer loop. Perhaps I haven't lived
I guess it's a personal thing. I personally don't like goto, because it can go anywhere. Other people like it for exactly the same reason. So it goes.
Argh didn't write that properly. I (obviously) meant:
x = (x << 1) | (x >> 7);
Anything you can do in assembly language, you can do in C.
Except roll-right (or left) without resorting to x = (x > 7), which requires you to know the size of x in advance, and is hard to read. And roll-through-carry is super-annoying in C.
Some cases I've used them for that I didn't feel dirty about are:
* checking for failure conditions from calls to sub-methods, and jumping to a common cleanup and exit code block. Difficult to replicate cleanly without massive if blocks, or abusing exceptions.
Or using C++...
* Cleanly breaking out of multiple nested loops
Tough one. I have to be honest, I've never used a goto in my code since I stopped writing BASIC, but I've sometimes missed this ability. Still, a language-level keyword like "breakall;" would be better than goto. Except insofar as it doesn't exist, and "goto" does...
* I've used them for an implementation of coroutines, which simulates threading for systems which don't have threads. In this case the GOTOs were nested inside macros and stub classes for holding context, but the whole scheme wouldn't have worked without them.
Sounds clever. I hate macros even more than goto, so I expect seeing the code would send me into anaphylactic shock.
That's not completely true. Millions of people around the world paying small amounts of money for iOS apps shows that it can be done. Additionally, I signed up for a $1.29/month charge for an extra 20G of iCloud storage, and it was extremely easy.
If Apple can figure it out, why can't spotify? Or is the 'enter your credit card' details step the part that you indirectly refer to as difficult? If so, then sure, there's no easy way of charging people a small amount of money without requiring and storing credit card details. If you can get people's credit card details, then what's the problem?
Of course, once you've launched a free service - and rightly or wrongly people really do expect free stuff - it's rather hard to convert that into a 'pay' service without losing a large percentage of your user base.
And of those scripts you link to, two stand out as being simple and to-the-point. The others are dreadfully complex, and *different* for every flavor of Linux. Utter madness.
The Systemd and Launchd ones are declarative statements to the system about how to handle the daemon. Seriously, what is not to like?
Why people would be in love with bash scripts and PID files to manage daemons on their OS I continue to be baffled by. In the meantime, I just use systemd and move on with my life.
Legal. Displacing. Dying.
Anyway. What does this story have to do with immigration specifically? Would the situation be considered acceptable if the IT department were laid off, and lower paid Americans were contracted in to continue the work? And if so, why?
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
