Roombas (and variants) are common household robots. YouTube has a lot of videos about Roombas cleaning a room while being ridden by a cat. Sometimes the cat is wearing a shark-suit.

Therefore, as this project progresses, Roombas will start to hunt cats in the neighborhood in order to get them to sit on top of them while they clean a room.

Or TFA is massively overstating the research and the concept and even robotics.

I've never heard someone saying a sentence like this in high school (girls or boys). Anyone?

Not me, either. If anything that would happen in college, wouldn't it?

Anyway, from TFA (by the way, is it really displaying as grey text on a white background):

NCWIT senior research scientist Catherine Ashcraft cites the 2008 Harvard Business Review study "The Athena Factor," which found that "56% of technical women leave their private sector jobs by mid-career," she said. "But 75% continue to work full-time, and approximately half of these continue to work in technical occupations.

Check my math, okay?
100 tech women
56% leave the private sector (56 in this example)
75% of the 56 continue to work full time (42 in this example)
~50% of 42 continue in tech (21 in this example)

So that 21 plus the 44 that did not change is 65. So only 35% of women in tech leave tech in mid-career. 65% are in tech and stay in tech full time.

What's the percentage of men who leave tech in mid-career? How does that compare to the 35% for women?

In her position as a professor of computer science at Union College, Barr found contextualizing computer science classes led to an increase in female enrollment.

I don't mean to sound mercenary here, but isn't "money" a major motivating factor? Paying the mortgage and such?

From TFA:

Police told My Fox Chicago that Stone was difficult during questioning and they arrested him and charged him with disturbing the school.

How did "the school" know about this? At most his teacher and the school principal and the regional/district/whatever superintendent should have been aware of the issue.

If anyone was "disturbing" "the school" it would have been one of those three (or the cops) and they should be arrested.

For a student, being "difficult during questioning" should (at most) result in expulsion AND NOT ARREST.

a. He's a he.
b. He's a teenager.
c. He goes to a school.
d. He wrote the word "gun" in a "fantasy" story.

Mandatory panic! Alert the police! Search EVERYTHING! Connect the dots!

Personally, I blame the teacher for not sufficiently explaining the limits of the assignment.

I agree. Even if what TFA says is true (it is not) then the US companies would be competing with companies around the world for those people. And their own governments.

Not to mention the ones who start their own companies and work for themselves.

Which would mean that those awesome programmers would have all the bargaining power. They wouldn't be accepting H-1B wages.

Statistically, there cannot be enough of "the best" to feed the stated demand for "the best".

But it makes sense if you substitute "cheaper" for "the best".

And that is reflected in the quality of the code being produced.

Because it wasn't 1,000 words long.

But the counter argument is that he clicks on links sent to him via email prior to verifying their origin (who sent them) or destination (where do they link to).

Next episode - If only there was some way to inform people that they should not click on links in email. Even if they think they're from someone they know. How will the bitter rivalry between MySpace and Friendster play out?

Given a choice, I think autonomous cars at some point WILL be programmed with such a choice. For example, hitting an elderly person in order to avoid hitting a small child.

Congratulations. Your product just injured Senator Somebody in order to avoid hitting a Betsy-wetsy doll.

Senator Somebody has filed "lawsuit" against your company. It is super-effective. All your assets are belong to him.

It doesn't have to identify all the objects in the area, it simply has to not hit them.

Which is an order of magnitude EASIER TO PROGRAM.

And computers can recognize an obstacle and brake faster than a person can.

And that is why autonomous cars will NEVER be programmed with a "choice" to hit person X in order to avoid hitting person A.

So the premise of TFA is flawed.

I wonder whether your insurance company would demand to know how you have set your car, and adjust your rates accordingly?

That does not matter because it won't be an option.

That is because "A.I." cars will never exist.

They will not exist because they will have to start out as less-than-100%-perfect than TFA requires. And that imperfection will lead to mistakes.

Those mistakes will lead to lawsuits. You were injured when a vehicle manufactured by "Artificially Intelligent Motors, inc (AIM, inc)" hit you by "choice". That "choice" was programmed into that vehicle at the demand of "AIM, inc" management.

So no. No company would take that risk. And anyone stupid enough to try would not write perfect code and would be sued out of existence after their first patch.

From TFA:

Do you remember that day when you lost your mind? You aimed your car at five random people down the road.

WTF?!? That makes no sense.

Thankfully, your autonomous car saved their lives by grabbing the wheel from you and swerving to the right.

Again, WTF?!? Who would design a machine that would take control away from a person TO HIT AN OBSTACLE? That's a mess of legal responsibility.

This scene, of course, is based on the infamous "trolley problem" that many folks are now talking about in AI ethics.

No. No they are not. The only "many folks" who are talking about it are people who have no concept of what it takes to program a car.

Or legal liability.

Itâ(TM)s a plausible scene, since even cars today have crash-avoidance features: some can brake by themselves to avoid collisions, and others can change lanes too.

No, it is not "plausible". Not at all. You are speculating on a system that would be able to correctly identify ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE AREA and that is never going to happen.

Wired is being stupid in TFA.

try them as a business communication tool, email beats them hands down

Exactly. While "kids" may "flock" to whatever is "cool" today, eventually you do have to deal with other adults in structured environments.

With email, usernames can be assigned in a structured fashion. And potentially offensive combinations can be weeded out.

With closed systems, it is usually first-come-first-served from around the world (and that's not counting multiple accounts per person). So you might not be able to get johnsmith. And "sukmahp3n1s" does not work so well when dealing with other companies.

As an admin/IT manager, what I'd like to see is:

1. Meaningful, specific error/log messages when something goes wrong.

Do this.

And make the error reports unique. No more "an unexpected error has occurred". Even "purple-monkey-dishwasher" is better than that. Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers. And that means making each error unique enough that the developers can search the code for it.

And have someone spend some time sorting through your forums (make sure you have forums) who can move threads and messages around while still maintaining the links to them. So someone with a "purple-monkey-dishwasher" error can see the other posts about that WITHOUT having to dig through unrelated "vitamin-can-hook" errors. Sortable by version. And by date.

Whether you agree with the politics of a particular site or not, the easiest solution is just to not enable posting graphics.

If someone wants to make an offensive graphic and host it somewhere, fine. But why would anyone running a controversial site allow posting such?

Imagine /. with goatse images.

Are things easier than they used to be? Perhaps for they basic system administration tasks.

But those have never been where the bulk of time and budget go.

They could be if you did not know what you were doing. Like I suspect the author of TFA did not know.

From TFA:

Where we once walked on tightropes every day doing basic server maintenance, we are now afforded nearly instant undo buttons, as snapshots of virtual servers allow us to roll back server updates and changes with a click.

If he's talking about a production system then he's an idiot.

If he's talking about a test system then what does it matter? The time spent running the tests was a lot longer than the time spent restoring a system if any of those tests failed.

And finally:

Within the course of a decade or so, we saw networking technology progress from 10Base-2 to 10Base-T, to 100Base-T to Gigabit Ethernet. Each leap required systemic changes in the data center and in the corporate network.

WTF is 10Base-2 doing there? I haven't seen that since the mid-90's. Meanwhile, every PC that I've seen in the last 10 years has had built-in gigabit Ethernet.

If he wants to talk about hardware then he needs to talk about thing like Cisco Nexus. And even that is not "new".

And, as you pointed out, the PROGRAMMING aspects always lag way behind the physical aspects. And writing good code is as difficult today as it has ever been.

Many people would be happy to increase their typing speed from 75 wpm to say 150 wpm.

Except that they'd have to put in a LOT of hours training on those systems to get that increase.

And for most of them, the majority of time is spent thinking about what to type.