Re additive technology: You're right. This is why I don't care much about the people who "make guns" with their 3-D printers. Some of them make lower receiver units because that's the legal definition of a "gun" even though in my eye's it's kind of like making the driver's door frame on a car and claiming you made a car because that's where the VIN goes.

To make a gun or anything else that needs to contain strong forces, I'll join TWX and put my faith in old-fashioned, non-groovy tools like milling machines, lathes, and drill presses. Yay, subtractive technology!

(Not knocking the 3-D print people - Fun stuff, no question.)

I'd use Watson as a great example of how deep learning systems won't make coding go away too soon. From the Wikipedia entry:

Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework. The system was written in various languages, including Java, C++, and Prolog, and runs on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing.

Any guesses as to how many lines of code and development hours are behind that stack? How about a guess as to how long it'll be before Watson is able to make useful contributions to a significant part of that software stack? Is it worth thinking about the hardware stack, or the effort put into curating the database?

Watson is, basically, a sophisticated search engine built upon a massive mountain of human effort.

Experience says that the more complex systems become and the more ubiquitously they're deployed, the more you need people who can build them, expand them, bend them and glue them into place. It doesn't seem to follow a curve like agriculture where productivity can continuously increase while labour contracts. It probably will turn that way, eventually, but I don't expect to be around for it.

Coding is likely to be obsolete in a few years - replaced by deep learning systems as those systems increase in capability, and so the last thing we should do is steer kids away from math and toward coding.

One of my computer science profs said that, pretty much word for word, when I suggested I wasn't interested in grad school. Except at the time "CASE" was the big buzzword.

From the rate of progress I've seen with these "make coding obsolete" initiatives, I expect I'll be well retired before that happens. And, even if they get something working, there's still going to be a job market for coders in gluing all these deep learning systems together.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

In her particular case, yes. That's why I said:

one might get a bit suspicious if this consistently happens to people in an under-represent demographic within the company.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

But the US population isn't their hiring pool, people qualified to do the job are their hiring pool.

We're specifically talking about people interviewing at Google, not the general US population. These are people who are, by definition, in their hiring pool.

I can entirely understand that the demographics of Google employees won't match that of the more general population. But if the demographics going into the interview process consistently and noticeably fail to match the demographics actually being hired, then it looks like there might be a problem. Which exact problem, I don't know. Poor pre-interview screening? There's many other potential reasons than rampant age discrimination, but I think there's also enough merit to the complaint for someone to start digging.

Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... -- ..." to indicate an incoming SMS.

OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.

The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.

I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.

Maintaining FIPS compliance did not make anything easier. It's essentially a prohibition on bug repair, as you have to recertify afterward. But the people who wanted FIPS were the only ones who were actually paying for someone to work on OpenSSL.

I don't think any of the other Free Software projects ever tried to be FIPS certified.