While I share your view that expecting the mind to be explained as a single neural network (in the Comp. Sci. sense) is probably simplistic, I don't think modeling it as multiple neural nets and a voter fixes the problem. I am not quite sure about this, but isn't a collection of neural nets and a voter equivalent to a single neural net? Or, to put it a slightly different way, for any model that consists of multiple neural nets and a voter, there is a single neural net that is functionally identical? I am assuming the voter is there to pick the most common classification by the component networks.

Konrad Zuse, who also built the first Turing-complete computer, designed the first high-level computer language, Plankalkul, in 1945 (though no compiler was implemented until 1998.)

Error-Free Software: Know-how and Know-why of Program Correctness by Robert L Baber, published by Wiley, ISBN 0 471 93016 4

http://www.amazon.com/Error-Fr...

This slim volume is by far the most readable and practical introduction to formal verification that I have seen.

Don't be put off by its somewhat overstated title.

I believe it is important for every professional programmer to have some understanding of how to construct a proof of correctness of code, even if they never use it professionally, as it will expand their understanding of programming. In my case, knowing what it would take to prove a program correct has changed the way I program, in ways that I hope improves the reliability of what I write.

What we have here is a failure to learn from previous mistakes - this bug violates a number of basic principles in the development of secure software, and most of those principles were derived from hard experience.

I will agree that there is one thing to be learned here: The phrase "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is simplistic wishful thinking, and potentially dangerous if mistaken for a realistic verification policy.

The 'many eyes' principle (aka Linus' Law) states "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". This claims a good deal more than simply that bugs are likely to be found eventually. Given the seriousness of this bug and the length of time taken to expose it, any claim that 'many eyes' worked in this case depends on a useless definition of 'worked'.

That is quite likely, but irrelevant. This severity and duration of the OpenSSL bug are not mitigated by the hypothetical (or even real) failings of closed-source vendors.

The open source community should move beyond this self-serving aphorism and adopt a more engineering-like approach to the correctness of critical software. Fortunately, I think the people actually doing the development are well aware of this.

According to this sort of argument, nothing bad ever happens. The Air France 447 crash will improve pilot training, the Boston Marathon bombing will improve race security...

This point of view gives us no insight in to how to improve things. It belongs in the 'not even wrong' category.

The phrase "tech job" is often used without distinguishing between engineering-like jobs and technicians' jobs. This study goes further still, including "jobs supported by technology" - given how technological out society has become, that could be a very broad group.

Strands vary so much that it is meaningless to consider them as a class for music-quality tests.

They also vary considerably in how much of the original remains.

Pointing out the age of XP merely emphasizes the lack of significant improvement since. When this happens to a technology, it is called maturity.

XP was the first Microsoft PC OS to be what all its predecessors aspired to be.

Agreed, and furthermore, even if he 'merely' spooked the runner to the point where she fell, then he was operating the drone irresponsibly.

This jerk needs to man-up and learn to take responsibility for his own actions. Until then, he shouldn't be operating a drone - or a car, for that matter.

There's a huge difference between identifying a principe behind some low-level aspect of neural activity, and explaining how the brain works. This sort of article (and other pronouncements of Dr. Bak, apparently) gives reductionism a bad name. Only if he could show how consciousness arises directly from neural self-organized criticality would the absurd hyperbole of the first paragraph be justified.

We can just secure our things the same way that the things currently on the internet - power plants, dams, oil refineries - are secured.

'Outing' has a connotation of a) the public identification of an individual, b) the disclosure of private information about that individual, and c) being against the (not necessarily explicitly stated) wishes of the individual. Neither a) nor b) occurred, which also means c) is moot.

Never trust a /. summary. They confirmed the participant's ownership of a firearm through public sources.