You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."

The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.

At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.

Why use gpg instead of s/mime, which has native support in most e-mail programs, with no need for plugins? Thunderbird included.

That's not lock in. You described a company doing what it takes to extend the market in which they can compete in. That's fantastic. Of course they have a plan to make money out of this move, but that's a perfectly legitimate and ethical way of doing so.

Well, they don't want to support it, and I don't blame them. Plus some idiot is going to try running mission critical software on it.

The truth of the matter is that if it runs games, it runs other things. I run Windows 3.11 on it. I run several applications both DOS and 16-bit Windows on it. Works great for me.

That said, don't take that as me disagreeing with you. I also often find things that catastrophically don't work. As in, they can corrupt the files they're opening/saving to. If you can't afford trying stuff out (and keeping backups of anything your software will interact with), then don't. If you can, it's worth a shot. Just don't go crying to the developers if something goes wrong, and all is good.

Well, depends on the use case. If you want to ensure your software will run on real DOS, you're right. However, in many cases, DOSBox will work better than native DOS. Run on DOSBox and never worry about not having enough conventional memory!

DOSBox will even let me install Win 3.11 drivers.

That's a good example of lagging development, actually. I have that need, but VirtualBox doesn't have Guest OS Additions for Win9x, which means incredibly slow and awkward performance. VMWare does have guest additions for Win9x, so I tend to use VMWare Player for that use.

Yeah, I suppose that's pretty nice. I can't vouch for it, because I haven't used that feature, but it sounds great.

Huh? DOSBox uses a folder on your box as it's C drive. Just copy that folder over to the new box, and you're done. No need to export or import anything. It's not like DOS has a registry to figure out what's installed, it just has config.sys and autoexec.bat, and whatever folders you installed things at. All of the DOSBox specific settings are really only about what hardware the DOS software sees, it has nothing to do with the host hardware (especially since the settings file now detects the CPU type you have and there's an auto setting for throttling cycles that works reasonably well). So you can copy the DOSBox settings file as well. If you use one of the many frontends, you can have a different configuration file for each game, which is another advantage over native DOS. I remember having an actual DOS Machine with a Turbo button because old games relied on clock cycles for their timing.

Again, sounds impressive.

Can't vouch for it again, but sounds nice.

That presupposes that what makes me happy depends on how I'll eventually end up once dead, and not on how well I'm doing while alive.

When I die, I won't be alive to care about what my relatives do what the stuff I own. While I'm living, I most certainly care about my stuff, and I live happier with it than without it. The goal is to maximize happiness while you're alive, and if having material stuff does that for you, go nuts. If it brings you more pain than happiness, then learn to find happiness elsewhere. What happens when you die has exactly zero relevance.

Unless you're dealing with a stiff system and that small error just caused you your iterations to start going divergent.

I mean, not to dismiss the approach, because I agree with you there are certainly lots of situations where it'll be fine. However, it's also one of those things that aren't going to replace current paradigms either. We're not going to go all lock free. We're going to add lock-free programming to the toolset.

Ok. Your logical flaw is a strawman argument. While the article claims entropy is responsible for the arrow of time, i.e., the directionality of it, you pretended it said it's responsible of the existence of time at all. Then you argued against your own statement and pretended that was a valid argument against theirs.

Here's what they're actually saying. Assume time exists. So entropy can either increase or decrease with the passage of time. However, there are many more configurations with increased entropy than decreased entropy, which means a statistically implied direction towards increased entropy.

This is a highly misunderstood topic, I'm going to try to clarify it.

You're correct about the concept of simultaneity in relativity. In the barn door example, depending on your frame of reference, the bars could open simultaneously or one after the other.

He's correct about causality in relativity. Causal events are invariant. There is no frame of reference in existence, regardless of your velocity or distance, in which an object shot by a bullet fired from a gun gets hit before the gun is fired. It can't happen. It doesn't happen because with such a causal event, at some point the bullet and the gun were at the same location and the distance between them was 0. Time dilation depends on speed and distance, because time dilation requires an accompanying lorentz contraction. After the bullet is fired, depending on your frame of reference, people can disagree how far the bullet is from the gun, how far the target is from the gun, and therefore how long it took the bullet to travel from the gun to the target. But no frame of reference exists in which people observe the target being hit and then the gun firing the bullet.

Well, reproducibility is part of peer review. If anyone is making decisions based on the results of one paper, they're idiots. Even if the research methodology was flawless, and the researchers are brilliant and honest with all their data, certain results can still come about as a result of chance. Obligatory xkcd

I wish we'd put more emphasis on reproducing published results, though. I've mentioned this before, but I feel like this would be the ideal work for grad students during their first few years, before they're deep in their own research. They need to get papers published, there should be journals devoted to publishing data from reproducing results. Students get experience writing papers and conducting research and everyone gets stronger peer review in their fields.

Yeah, but they replace the low-level introduction courses in college, not the more advanced ones. 100-level computer science courses in college ARE, "how to program in Java." And, like I said, my Calculus course in High School seemed better than the equivalent in college from what I was seeing.

If anything, those high school courses mean you don't have to take the BS introductory courses in college, and you can go straight to the more interesting / demanding ones during your freshman year.

Unless you're an actual statistics major (in which case you'll pick up whatever you missed in subsequent courses anyway), that's going to be true regardless of whether you take statistics in high school or college. I took AP statistics, but my university required me to take "Statistics for Engineers" as an EE major, and wouldn't allow the AP stat course to count towards that. Stats for Engineers was an absolute joke, and the high school class was for more rigorous.

It stands for "Advanced Placement." They're college-level high school courses. At the end of the year, you take the advanced placement exam, and depending on your scores and the college you attend, you can get college credits for them.

I think getting rid of an AP is a stupendously short-sighted idea. Having students take more advanced courses earlier is a great idea. If there's reason to believe the courses aren't actually as demanding as their college equivalent (and I don't think there is, based on my experience taking AP Calculus in high school and looking at what people taking Calculus in college were seeing. We covered the same material, and if anything my high school class covered more), then you can make an argument for the tests more challenging / add to the requirements of those courses. Getting rid of it is just an attempt to waste students' time and extract more money from them by forcing them to take more university courses.

To be fair, I also think it's right and normal for foreign intelligent agencies to try spying on Americans. It's our counter-intelligence job to prevent it.

The NSA should be sure as hell trying to spy on every single non-American out there. It's their counter-intelligence job to limit it.

If the only thing he did was expose the illegal spying being done on Americans, I'd agree with that. But he indiscriminately takes everything he can get his hands on and reveals perfectly legal programs, like this one. "Identifying and blocking foreign threats" is the NSA's job, and why wouldn't that include cyber attacks? What justification does he have for revealing this?

I think we should specifically pardon him for for the relevant whistleblowing, to encourage other people in those positions to do the right thing. But we should sure as hell prosecute him for everything else he's leaked.