19% makes sense only if "IoT developer" includes everyone whose job title includes the words INTERNET, OF, or THINGS.

Of course you could anonymize source code using an obfuscator.

But maybe the simpler way is to compile Java to bytecode, then decompile it back to Java. I suspect that's as effective as most obfuscators.

Yes, absolutely I'm concerned. The radiologist got it wrong in assessing the tumor to have grown. That's so important to a cancer patient as to be an unpardonable sin.

But given the hodgepodge of modern medical testing, it's not terribly surprising. Clinical CT or MR images often have low resolution or voxels that are anisotropic (usually, longer head-to-toe than side-to-side). When comparing two images with differing resolutions, voxel shapes, or subject poses, two images can be difficult to compare.

That said, recommending surgery based on a mistaken read of an image is something I would *definitely* be concerned about. But that's why we get second opinions.

I haven't seen the article or video. But for 99% of developers, I'd say the only CPU-level changes since the 8086 that matter are caches, support for threading and SIMD, and the rise of external GPUs.

Out-of-order scheduling, branch prediction, VM infrastructure like TLBs, and even multiple cores don't alter the programmer's API significantly. (To the developer/compiler, multicore primitives appear no different than a threading library. The CPU still guarantees microinstruction execution order.)

Some of the compiler optimization switches have become more complex, and perhaps a few coding idioms are now deprecated/encouraged so that compilers better understand what you intend (so you don't make their job unnecessarily harder).

But overall, almost all developer techniques don't benefit from changes to CPU microarchitecture after 1990, aside from caches, SIMD, and GPUs.

And of course, ever since the 80486 (1989), all CPUs support floating point instructions.

If there had been a major outcry from Muslims, how would you know? Are you attuned to their media?

Do you imagine most Muslims belong to sopme sort of large collective whose spokesman appears before media outlets to make official pronouncements? AFAIK, they don't. Aside from Catholics and the Pope, neither do Christians.

What's more, do you imagine that Muslims speak with one voice on most issues? When's the last time Christians agreed on anything?

I know a few muslims in the US. They tend not to be that outspoken about their beliefs, probably out of fear of intolerance. Like yours.

('Archangel Michael'? Really? How old are you?)

There's a wonderful article "The Case Against Credentialism" by James Fallows in the The Atlantic (1985) which reads as if it were written today: http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...

It assesses professional degrees like MBAs as being inherently worth next to nothing, essentially serving a broken agenda in which our highly credentialed leaders know everything about form but nothing about function. Maybe virtual expertise is enough to govern a virtual world?

Too bad the US political parties didn't read this prior to the 2000 election. Maybe the would have fielded worthier candidates (and staff), and the US could have saved about a million lives and a few trillion bucks). Such is the cost of driving under the influence, I guess.

A bullpen makes a lot of sense to me. If coworkers doing exactly the kind of work I do were colocated, we'd all learn quickly what forms of interaction were productive and preferred, so we could avoid getting on each others' nerves. I used to work in a suite containing only team members. We all preferred it greatly to our present cubicle farm.

The principal problem with open offices are the disturbances arising from non-team members, especially the rude few who won't consider the harm their noise inflicts on neighbors.

Etzioni's point is a good one. To date, all AI apps have been designed to passively sit and do nothing until given a specific task. Only then do they act. For Hawking to be proved right, AIs must take the initiative, to choose their own goals. That's a horse of an entirely different color.

Of course, there's no reason why AI agents could not become more autonomous, eventually. Future task specs might become more vague while AIs are likely to become more multipurpose. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll have mobile robots able to do more than sweep floors in a random pattern. But Commander Data is a long way from an iRobot Roomba or Rethink's Baxter, both of which are dumber than my phone.

In the real world, autonomous robots are not going to arise for decades. And when they do, if they drive on the same streets or share the same office spaces, they too will have to obey the same rules of conduct as the rest of us. You won't get special privileges just because your brain is made of silicon.

Editing the historical record sounds awfully like hiding your past. Why isn't this like pretending the Holocaust or Stalins purges just never happened? Wouldn't IBM like to assert (without contradiction) that it never assisted the Nazis in the Death Camps?

This is an initiative only a corporate tool could love.

That's where US R&D dollars have gone. Camelot!

If you read the court case mentioned, the supreme court ruled that a search warrant was required before police could access the defendant's computer, which they did not do.

Anonymity was tangential to the case at best.

Exactly. This announcement marks the official start of the Obama presidency Reality Distortion Phase, where the lame duck madly fabricates an idyllic legacy that he gave a damn for liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Just like Nixon.

Right. With luck this kind of exurban facility will make good use of selective dispensations from the MI DMV to extend their trials off premises and onto roads like you describe.

Dialing up the real world noise is essential to bring these cars up to speed -- missing or obstructed lane markers and signs, poorly marked or uneven road edges, and the introduction of noise like leaves, snow banks, and pools of accumulated rainwater all need to be mastered before automation has any business driving cars, buses, trucks, or passengers in the many parts of the country like the Michigan coutnryside where often "the sun don't shine".

Exactly. Ann Arbor has persistent winter snow and occasional sleet, heavy rain, tornados, and even flooding. Its weather is often a perfect storm for drivers and a far cry from the ideal idyllic settings used so far to test automatic cars.

A2 is the real world. And its mix of academia and auto company proximity make it ideal for this role. Seems like a perfect marriage.

If we were serious about ending criminal acts in the US government, we would:

1) create a fully independent office inside the government to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers, with powers no less than congress' Special Prosecutor (i.e. equal to the presidency)

2) offer whistleblowers generous retirement benefits for life (to escape retribution)

3) give them blanket immunity from prosecution

4) prosecute the gov't wrongdoers all the way up the chain of command, *starting* at top executive levels

But the US government does the opposite. That's the very definition of racketeering and organized crime.