We're seeing an upswing in the tech economy because the world economy has been depressed since it was shot in the chest by Wall Street in 2008. Enough time has now passed (6 years) that the need to replenish neglected IT infrastructure has finally overcome the blind dumb fear of robotic C suiters. That and they're tired of listening to the shrieks of B suiters that they're sick of struggling along with only half the tech staff they really need.

(On a related note, last year's upswing in US stock values was due *not* to US economic growth but to investor flight from risk, away from stocks in developing countries and back into safe US blue chips.)

Unless this law explicitly and forcefully disallows bulk warrantless data collection of the public, NSA's top creeps (like Clapper and Alexander) and unprincipled gov't lawyers (like John Yoo) most certainly will crush the Constitution underfoot at their earliest convenience.

Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs...

Good point. Self destruction of errant (or sabotaged) mobile e-devices seems like a very good idea.

Maybe these bacteria could be programmed with a specific behavior, like follow a signal to travel to a specific part of the body, then measure something or deliver a payload. Then self-destruct.

Sounds like "Fantastic Voyage"...

If e-proteins can augment electronic devices biologically, can they also augment biological systems electronically? They seem like a natural interface between biological and electrical materials -- perfect for constructing a cyborg. Or if made small enough, they could bypass DNA to synthesize (or inhibit) the right proteins at just the right time, thereby curing disease.

You could basically rewire and/or reprogram any part of an organism at any level: subcellular (e.g. metabolic control networks), tissue, immune, neural, etc. You could add intelligent controls where there are none or override controls already present.

This kind of thing also seems an ideal medium for building junctions between nerves and muscles.

The best preparation for becoming a good programmer (or scientist or engineer) is to learn how to organize your thoughts and then address only what is necessary and sufficient to accomplish a given task.

I know no book that teaches clarity of thought better than Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style". Clear writing and great coding share a common wellspring.

If someone wants to escape their past, they need to get a retraction of the DATA itself, not all links to the data.

In the case oif the spaniard who wanted his bankruptcy to go unnoticed, he needs to get the owner of that factoid to remove it. If the fact remains online, then it's most certainly *not* someone else's responsibility to route others around the minefield you've laid.

This ruling is censorship, pure and ugly.

1) Yes. The decision to fire the weapon and authorize lethal force is discrete and binary. That is indeed well defined. By launching it, arming it, and ordering it to engage the "enemy" you have made the decision to kill. Any human private who kills without prior authorization to engage is in violation of the rules of combat. Authorizing him/her to kill *is* the issue here.

2) ??? The technique of projecting force is irrelevant. It's the *authorization* of of autonomous dispatch of lethal force that's the issue.

3) Yes, of course requiring a human to authorize a kill certainly can be implemented. This isn't part of an arms race. It's just a new aspect of any military's "rules of engagement". It's no different from the Geneva Convention's rules on treatment of prisoners of war, or banning the use of chemical or biological (or nuclear) weapons.

Why is the cost of one of today's (dumb) Tomahawks relevant? It can't order itself to self destruct. And I can't believe any have ever been ordered (by a human) to self destruct, without *somebody* being busted several ranks.

What's more, an fully autonomous Tomahawk is going to cost a good deal more than $1.45 million. Nobody inferior to a colonel is going to pop that cork, and certainly not the missile itself.

No. That scenario still misfires.

This strikes me as a false dichotomy. Nobody is going to launch a million dollar bullet (smart missile) then tell it to self destruct. Until smart bullets drop enormously in cost, this scenario is infeasible.

Assuming the cost of a smart bullet does fall, the initial authorization to fire it is still a decision to kill. The fact that something or someone might later reverse the decision does not mean the initial choice to launch was not a kill.

The goal of this controversy is that no machine should never have the authority to issue the *first* kill command. That responsibility should always lie with a human. With that, I concur.

Like VB.net. I've never seen a tidy simple language morph into anything so monstrous. C++ comes close, though.

Frankenly, I'm forever amazed at how low the standard is for programming language enrapture. I'm sure it's due partly to 1) a lack of experience with other languages, and 2) a lack of imagination.

Sadly, I suspect the biggest source of this pathology is that most programming tasks are mindblowingly dull: load/unload a form, query a RDBMS, check for bad data, etc). Developers inevitably want a way to spice up deadend tasks like these (which admittedly is a better response than suicide). So they willing adopt / invent wildly overcomplex tools in the hopes that their humdrum existence will gain meaning. Or distraction at least.

Many less mainstream languages are *far* smaller, more legible, and sufficiently expressive as those at the Top of the Pops (e.g. C++, Java, Python), but they don't receive the needed mindshare (or libraries) needed to compete. Perhaps they just need their syntax to be a *bit* more Kafkaesque. (So what *is* Larry Wall doing these days?)

Or I suppose they could just add pointers...

I strongly agree with most of your post, but direct democratic governance is an invitation to manipulate the uninformed voter. Left to a direct democratic vote, we'd have dozens of added fatuous amendments, like outlawing flag burning, embracing christianity over other religions, and requiring onerous voter ID enforcement.

A preferable alternative might be to ask registered voters to take a knowledge test that apportions a greater/lesser weight to their vote in proportion to their score. That way the informed electorate would have greater impact on policy and the clueless something less.

A thorny problem. But almost any change would be an improvement over today's status quo.

I don't tweet or text, but I skim through a lot of online news and articles. In the past couple of years, I've found it increasingly difficult to work my way through serious technical writing (e.g. research papers), math, or worse yet, my old code.

Yes, science & engineering papers are notoriously tersely (badly) written, as are most math and eng books. But these days I find myself almost unable to slow down and step through difficult passages. I gloss over the sticky stuff much more than I did maybe 20 years ago.

Maybe my brain is getting old. Maybe not.

Consider Colorado State. They offer numerous on-line-only degree programs. Look at their Master's program in Computer Science.

(There's no point in earning another bachelor's when a MS is just as fast and requires only 10 semester courses. It's done all the time. I did it with a BS in zoology. You usually take a couple prerequisite courses at a local comm college then enroll as a grad student.)

http://www.online.colostate.ed...

I assume you live in Colorado and would pay a lot less for in-state tuition there. That's why I suggest CSU. Or University of Colorado.

http://cuengineeringonline.col...

I strongly recommend Georgia Tech's new MS in CS too. For the price, I'm confident you can't do better, although it will take several years before GT can offer courses on the full range of CS topics.

If you could pony up $50k somehow, you might also consider Stanford or Columbia, both of whom offer excellent MS in CS programs entirely on-line.

Personally I would stay VERY FAR away from schools that are on-line ONLY. AFAIK, all major tech employers have no respect for them. If you compare the workload (difficulty of textbooks, homework, and exams) with those at excellent state schools (like Georgia Tech), they do not compare well.

If you do consider such a school, I strongly recommend you contact several managers at companies you respect (via LinkedIn?) and ask if they hire graduates from those schools. Don't just assume that they do. And avoid HR staff. They know little about assessing candidate abilities.

I was moments away from buying Oculus' 2nd gen SDK just to play with the thing. It could have been a blast.

But now that they've been assimilated by the Borg, Oculus VR has been mortally poisoned. What a shame.

OK, you've identified a bug that happened to fly past your tiny laser beam. Ignoring the zillion other bugs in your yard that did NOT fly past your beam, now you need to track this bug to confirm its location before you:

1) Turn on/off a gigantic bug zapper that will zap ONLY the bug you've targeted. And you'll do this by instantly powering up a large UV lamp and power grid that draws your moth straight to your flame?

2) Shoot the bugger down? With what, a missile? A laser? How long is your gun targeting system going to continue to work (safely) when left outdoors in-or-near the weather for months or years?

3) How many of these contraptions will you need to control your bad bug population? A laser bug zapper is unlikely to de-bug more than 1/8 acre. Is a farmer really going to buy 320 of these to patrol his back 40?

Not buggy likely.