one day, computers will be twice as fast and ten times as big -- vacuum tubes? meet transistors.
computers can't get any more popular because we'll run out of copper. . . zinc. . . nickel -- welcome to silicon. Is there enough sand for you?

everything will stay the way it is now forever. things will never get any faster because these issues that aren't problems today will eventually become completely insurmountable.

relax. take it easy. we don't solve problems in-advance. capitalism is about quickly solving huge problems, while totally ignoring small and medium problems.

wait for it. computers will be different in twenty years. I promise.

Have you ever read the back of your ticket? Check out your MLB baseball tickets too. You've agreed to not talk to a small gathering of your own friends about the game too.

So, without commenting on accuracy, precision, completion, mis-diagnoses, missed symptoms, bias, colour correctness, nor smell, I think convenience is the all-time most important part of a doctor's check-up.

Oh yeah, house-calls. Remember? That's where we started. We are where we are because we made it convenient for the doctors, not for the patients. Remember? The guy with the expertise gets the convenience. Remember? The guy getting paid gets to make the rules. Remember?

Quite well actually. With an aim for artificial intelligence, I started in the computer science set of courses, hated what it was in terms of mathematical algorithms, shifted to the psychology set of courses and wound up in cognitive modelling with lisp and neural networks. Of course, as with any independent learner, I then focused on my own business, programming web-oriented business solutions for small and medium business. I still program the odd neural network solution now and then.

All of that said, apparently it was a very odd and very unusual university experience. Completely unstructured, and no one else in the same "stream" of courses. Obviously I had no appreciation for how unusual that is. But as an entrepreneur, that's been true for ages.

University got me through the years of friends and family telling me to "get a real job" and to "get a degree to fall back on". With six-months left to get my degree, I left the world of academia behind me forever, to focus on my successful business, which worked out splendidly.

So yes, I see it as two-and-a-half years wasted in that I'd have rather spent it developing my business full-time; but I didn't know that before hand, so I see it as the limbo-time to realize that I don't fall back on things, I fall forward, and that my own business is infinitely more stable than any real job, and it's a much better lifestyle too.

How did it work out for me? It got me what I wanted, when I wanted it, the way I wanted it. So, perfectly.

I did that 15 years ago.

You drive your car quite fast on roads with on-coming traffic separated by nothing more than a stripe of paint.

There's no limit to the amount of security that you can add to a network. But in the end, the odds are fairly good that fixing the few problems likely to occur is far simpler and more cost-effective than preventing them in the first place.

Obviously, we're talking about a small business, that isn't subject to large and persistent attacks. And should the day come when it is, that's when increased security can come around.

Regarding the ecommerce side of things, most small companies use ecommerce to receive money. So the worst thing that can happen is that they receive more money. That'll be noticed. Providing they aren't storing credit cards, then there's nothing to lose.

Safety third: first the job needs to actually get done, otherwise there was no point in starting it. second, the job needs to be worth doing, or there was no benefit to having done it. third it needs to be done safely. think of all of the great achievements that came from numbers one and two without any degree of reasonable safety. think the discovery of new worlds, exploration, animals, major construction, and every dangerous job out there. the line of what's considered "safe" moves quite freely to accomodate the other two priorities.

Safety Third.

just a guess: none. Unless, of course, we're comparing it to other activities like running, cycling, playing with children, sex, and driving the right kind of car. Then it's less than none.

Compared to alcoholic drinking, computer use is very healthy.

It's never been about cost. Even at the early prices, it was "affordable" for a one-off life-changing surgery.

The issue is the same as it's always been. There is risk. There is virtually zero reward. My vision isn't poor enough that I can't go to the bathroom at night. I wear glasses all day every day, minus sleeping, sex, and swimming. Right now, I have zero problems, and a set of light glasses on my face.

Why would I ever risk damage to my eyes -- which I use to earn every dollar of revenue to fund my life -- when I can do nothing and having everything that I plan to have?

It's an easy decision. I don't opt for voluntary surgery. That's the rule.

Depends on the humidity.

Consider all of the tasks that you do as a part of your job. Identify which ones should absolutely never be automated -- maybe they're too dangerous, maybe the risk is too great, maybe they're too much fun. I'd bet that upgrading the OS would be pretty well the top of your never-automate-this list.

Yeah, um, just, no. Once a decade at the science centre is one thing; weekly in public is something totally different.

I ain't touching that with a ten-foot pole.

So let me get this straight. Humans are bad because they create computer viruses. . .that apparently the conscious computers can't easily resist. Thanks for re-iterating 100 years of sci-fi non-sense.

I, for one, look forward to living the life of a pet. Like a puppy; safe and happy.

Of course, I may be a wee-little-bit different from most. I guard ants in my house and spiders have my full protection -- but that's because I'm smarter than most humans.

So if a language is particularly awful, and troublesome to use, or used by students discussing homework exercises, then it'll score high here. Thanks for the useless popularity sketch.

v5.8.8. So yeah, it winds up suddenly auto-vivifying a few million array elements. You must have gotten lucky that your memory address just happened to look like a negative number.

Yup, that's what I did too! Now I laugh hysterically at it in hind-sight.

Ok, here's another simple bug that had an unexpected symptom..
my $spi = [5,6];
my $ind = [2];
$spi->[$ind] = 7;

Why might line three take thirty full seconds to execute?