Nah; a better comparison would be like making a backup dump. Then, if the original hardware (body) dies, you can just configure a new one and restore all its data from the backup.

Maybe that's what a "soul" really is, a backup made continuously in some celestial data vault.

Of course they will, since they'll generally know their creator(s) personally, and they'll be in routine communication.

A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us. The result is that many of us just dismiss them as making it all up (probably for profit), and they're not really communicating with any such beings at all. If they are, why can't they show us the evidence?

Any real AIs wouldn't have this problem, since their creators would be out and about, showing off their creations for all the world to see (and also for profit).

http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/TH...
MAJIKTHISE:
I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may -

VROOMFONDEL:
Or may not be

MAJIKTHISE:
[Softly] or may not be [louder] a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you ‘is telephone number?

VROOMFONDEL:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

The GOP realized that this is not a policy that’s going to help them keep the Senate in 2016. Right now the GOP is dominated by old Republicans who want the party to attract young voters, so ginning this issue up into a war wasn’t worth pissing off the young voters. The other important group in the GOP are the sham libertarians who are trying to bring wealthy techies into their camp. Going to war over net neutrality would halt Rand Paul’s advance into silicon valley. All the money the telcos and cable companies can throw at the GOP isn’t really worth pissing off all the people who want uninterrupted streams from Chaturbate and Russian pirate TV streams.

Funny, but also maybe relevant. Boston is one of many cities that resulted from the slow expansion and merger of a group of small towns that were essentially separate communities before the days of modern transportation. It has lots of "centers" that used to be separated by forest and farmland, but are now a continuous urban area.

It's not hard to find other cities that developed this way. Other cities grew from a specific original center, usually a port area, and were never a "merger of equals". I wonder if the study distinguished these two major cases, and has anything to say about what (if any) structural differences we might find between them.

Does this include ads?

I've done a number of demos of what a site can do to you with pre-fetching. I make a page that shows viewers a few pictures, but also has "hidden" links that you don't see to other images, videos, etc. There are several ways of including such links without the browser actually showing them, which I won't waste time with here. I also include at least one link that's visible as an ordinarily link pointing to a large file that takes a while to download. After talking a while about other parts of the page, I tell the person to click on that link -- and observe that the content shows instantly, although it's obvious large and should take a while to download. This gets across the concept of pre-loading, and why it's useful. But I can also explain that it means stuff you never looked at may have also been downloaded.

Then I tell them to take a look at the source (perhaps teaching them how to do that), and point out the hidden links. I invite them to imagine what the pre-loading could have "installed" in their browser's cached without their knowledge. For instance, they could now be on their local government's terrorist or drug dealer or religious heretic or kiddie-porn lists because of what was just pre-loaded, and the evidence is sitting in their cache. I invite them to discover just what those links actually pre-loaded. And no, I won't tell them how to do that, any more than an actual hostile web site will.

Sometimes I grin and tell them that if they haven't done anything wrong, they have nothing to hide, right? ;-)

Actually, the hidden links generally point to rather innocent stuff, like tourism photos or wikipedia pages or cute cat videos, but they don't know that unless they figure out how to see the hidden content. The most useful is probably a page that simply explains that I could have linked to anything on the Web, and I'll leave it to their imagination what could be in their cache as a result.

Heh. I have a number of friends (acquaintances, colleagues, etc.) who are giving up on IOS, after numerous cases of their apps rejected by Apple, and then in many cases duplicated a month or two later by an Apple app. This tends to lead to a certain amount of what we might call cynicism about the whole process.

I like to remind them (or tell them, if they haven't read their history) that this has always been the story in "cottage industry". You do the work on your own time, and the employer then decides whether what you did deserves pay (and often keeps the rejects rather than returning them to to the worker). Historically, people working in cottage industries have been rather poor, since the employers control the market and take most of the income for their own coffers. In the modern software industry, the employers also normally claim any "intellectual property" that you develop, which of course includes everything that you create if you're a software developer.

But it's nothing new; it's how "unregulated" industries have always worked. Maybe it'll be fun (in a historian sense) to stick around and see how it all plays out in the long run.

Unless you’re retired it’s almost impossible to live in the developed world and not interact with computers on a daily basis. So computer literacy is an important part of daily life in the USA. So everybody needs to know something about programming or they’ll be incapable of understanding basic and important concepts that are relevant to daily life.

But that doesn’t mean that we need to reshape our entire educational system to crank out more software developers so that tech companies can pay lower salaries, which is really what’s behind many of these big efforts to push coding into schools.

One year vaper, previously 20 year smoker. I've had the medical labs done to show how much damage was undone in just one year.

At 41, I can run farther and faster, keep up with young folk better than most of my non-smoker friends of the same age. 3 years ago this was not the case.

Not surprising; your "BBC English" and our "media English" over here in North America are basically artificial dialects developed by the broadcast industries starting back in the 1940s. They even managed to do some fairly scientific testing, assembling listeners with different native dialects, and counting their mistakes when listening to different proposed pronunciations of various words and phrases. Their intent was to to develop dialects that were easily understood by most of their target audiences, and they did a reasonable job of it.

This doesn't help the computers' voice recognition software very much, though, because few customers speak these "standard" artificial dialects well. The software people aren't working on making the customers understand the computer's speech; they're trying to get the computers to understand untrained humans speaking their native dialects. This requires rather different processing than what the broadcasters were trying to do, and is a much more difficult task for us humans, too. It doesn't help that the computers are often listening to humans who aren't totally awake and sober ...

Heh. You obviously haven't work with any of the more expensive ones. I have a small collection of different portable gadgets for web testing, and that statement about buttons definitely isn't true for the various Apple tablets or phones. Thus, there's a little "x" icon whose function is to close the tab/window. I've learned to just start tapping it about twice per second, and maybe by the 3rd or 4th or 6th or 10th tap, it'll close.

Of course, the little monster might know very well that I'm tapping it, but wants to see how serious I am about it.

Of course, Apple's gadgets aren't the only ones like this. They're just one of the worst of a bad lot. And often it's a good idea to not tap too fast, because when the window finally closes, it usually gets replaced with another that'll do something totally unexpected when you tap it in that newly-exposed spot.

Lessee, what might they mean by this? I'm guessing that they set up a committee to review their data-security methods, and have modified them to make it more difficult for the "authorities" to get at the information.

As with political campaigns, when a business uses the word "change" without being specific, you should generally assume that the change will not be to your advantage.

I wonder if any journalist has good information on just what the supposed changes have been. But I wouldn't bet on anything, since it's routine for the PR folks to just make up things that they'd like the journalists to publish.

Well, they can be done recursively, but their usual definitions imply the simpler iterative approach. Using them leads to the problem that you often see, not just with young students, but even with experienced "professional" programmers: They learn that recursion is just a complex, obscure way to do iteration.

If you actually want to get across why recursion is important, you really should use examples in which recursion gives a simpler solution than iteration. One of my favorites, partly because people are usually surprised to discover that it's actually best done recursively, is a task that software does a lot: Given a binary number, generate the decimal representation of the number. The natural (iterative) divide by 10 and output the remainder of each step gives the digits in reverse order. This is fine if you're putting the result in a fixed-width field that you know is wide enough, but it's not fine if you're generating ordinary text with just one space before and after the number or if you don't know how many digits the number will have. To generate the number iteratively in the order we usually say or write the digits requires two passes, one to count the digits, and the other to write them. Or you can generate the digits in little-endian order into a large buffer, then use a second iteration through that buffer to output the digits in big-endian order.

But a faster, more elegant way is to write it recursively, with a routine that saves its remainder digit while it passes the quotient to a recursive call of itself. The bottom-level call finds it has a 1-digit number so it doesn't make the recursive call, but simply outputs its digit, and returns to the caller, which writes the 2nd digit, and so on. Students that understand this now know that recursion can sometimes simplify some (but not all) problems.

There are number of other simple problems that are best solved recursively, but this page's margin is to small to hold the list. ;-)