Isn't that like saying modern car manufacturers don't have to thank Henry Ford for paving the way? Little bit of an understatement. I'm not even going to dive into the details in differences in resources between those groups, a small team vs. 1000's of code breakers. Anyway, they all relied on mistakes made by German operators, even the British bombe. They were just different in nature and complexity.

Hell yeah, and the only difference between modern computers and the cryptological bombas used during WW2 is just electronics miniaturization! Stupid elementary stuff my friends! Yeah, it's not so simple my friend. There's a reason it takes *decades* and thousands of brilliant minds to advance technology step by step. The Saturn V is not simply a bigger, better version of "fireworks". You've been playing too much Kerbal space program.

Yeah I lol'd too. "Oh look, we had a team of developers accidentally build out a fully functioning module into the TV's OS, tested it, worked out the bugs, published it, and it also just so happens to make our company more money. This is an outrage, how could this have possibly happened?".

Watch out everyone, software is now evolving on its own! It's beginning, machines are rising! Where is Sarah Connor!?!?

The Sarbanes-Oxley act has been on the books since 2002. Dodd-Frank bill since 2010. So are they working to keep companies in check and increase transparency? Or just costing both the government and the companies it affects a bunch of time and money? On one side you can say this activity was finally caught. On the other hand you have to ask when large banks are subject to regular audits how do they get away with it from year to year?

From my own limited personal experience, the only thing I can say for sure is that those audits are usually pretty terrible. In theory they're looking for the right stuff, but the auditors themselves are usually green accountants who often lack the hybrid blend of accounting, technical, and IT skills needed to any proper analysis. They don't understand what they're looking at and don't know what to ask for. They usually just follow a sheet of instructions line by line and check those boxes to indicate their work is done. I don't think that quite captures the spirit of those laws.

I love how everyone always loves to see things in black and white. To hell with gray and all of its multiple points, variables, and conclusions. Considering games (and online ones too) vary wildly from hermit-like pressing a single button repetitively vs. memorizing complexities and extreme social cooperation, your mileage will vary extremely from game to game. Even within the same game people will have different experiences. Yes we've all seen games change people. Sometimes for both better, sometimes for worse, and sometimes both. Surprise, surprise, this closely resembles any other life experience with anything?

Games can be crafted and played in various ways, they can be even crafted to teach. But I still agree at the end of the day, most games are entertainment. They don't teach you astrophysics. Especially when you consider the game play these days by volume, most of it is mindless screen mashing cell phone games. Most complex games, or games that focus on ultra-realism, are usually niche games with only 10's of thousands of players instead of millions.

This made me chuckle, I think your own argument flew right over your own head. As you've clearly pointed out, disrupting an the original equilibrium creates a new and different equilibrium. Yes, you sir are absolutely correct.

So let's use an extreme example. Let's destroy photosynthesis driven life on this planet somehow. What happens then? Hey the ecosystem now will search our its new equilibrium which now only includes life that survive by feeding off the energy from geothermic vents! What's wrong? We've found our new equilibrium, clearly there's no fragility here. Everyone can keep calm and carry on :)

IMHO the primary ingredient is diligence, just like everything else. Everything else is secondary. I think the idea that only certain people can be programmers is as silly as saying only certain people can be physically fit. Yes, some people will naturally be better at it than others, just like when it comes to physical fitness. The notion however that only a select few may enter is both ignorant and also party responsible for so few people entering the field. There are brilliant mechanics and terrible mechanics, brilliant doctors and terrible doctors, this is more a function of people and their level of effort and less a function of difficulty of material. I was a teacher assistant while studying CS and from my experience laziness was the #1 killer of students, both "smart" and "dumb". I always thought there was something tragic and beautiful to see someone naturally "ungifted" in intelligence whomp someone who was naturally gifted with intelligence just because they tried harder.

I've been watching Blackberry for over a year and these buyout rumors always, always, always get started when Blackberry's stock is at its worst and falling rapidly. This is one of the most consistently-wildly-volatile stocks I've ever watched. The short interest on this is ridiculous while at the same time you have zealous firm believers who are awaiting the messiah's return. Then you have a CEO with a good record of turnarounds but who is so adamant about no buyouts. Then you have their GAAP vs. non-GAAP results. It's just an incredible perfect storm of what-ifs and maybes. It's also quite a dangerous stock to follow where anyone can easily be crushed by a bad wave. But if you're the one peddling these rumors and controlling the timing, well by golly Baal-Hamon be praised, there's money to be made and that special someone is making an absolute killing...

It's like he said, "oh yeah, I forgot about that 'change' thing I promised". It's about time something like this went down, I can't stand how the US setup has its telecom infrastructure currently setup.

Which hybrid models are you talking about? I heard quite the opposite on a Prius but I'm totally unfamiliar with the dozens of other flavors out there...

It's a great thought but which is worse, denying them opportunities for social mobility or teaching them only what they need to know? I know we have tons of problems in the US but the idea still survives here that you can reach for any rung in the ladder if you dare and work to climb. We wouldn't want to jeopardize that. So I think you just have to do both. I'd also further argue the primary responsibility of teaching children grit, self-control, curiosity lies with the family. Schools can only be asked to reinforce it. We really need to return to the notion that families raise their own kids and they go to school primarily for education and everything else is secondary.

I was raised in an immigrant family with humble beginnings and very high expectations. That was reinforced on a near daily basis. How could we ever expect teachers to teach that? It's just not their place.

Maybe you can cite some of your sources? I'm all about renewable energy, but it sounds like you're cherry picking and blurring data.

Slim chance to get hired at a big firm, best shot is to make very good friends with someone already on the inside that can vouch for you but that's still slim. It's not laziness on HR's part, they're just covering themselves. The unfortunate reality is, as much as you may think you've turned your life around, nobody wants the liability of hiring a felon. If you ever accused of doing something, no matter **how small** someone would trace back and find out you were a felon and automatically (unfairly) cast blame on that lone fact. Even if it's only an accusation, it will likely blow up. Say someone files a fictitious sexual harassment suit against you and then bam. Not only are you done because you're already guilty without an investigation, but also someone will then get fired in HR for disregarding your criminal past and blamed for hiring you to begin with. Very few people are willing to take that risk on a person with a criminal record when there are other clean candidates out there, the ocean has too many fish. It's not IT's fault, it's not even HR's fault, it's society's fault for setting things up this way and being "OK" with we treat other human beings.

My recommendation is to just go for a small firm where you have a better chance of getting to know people there, and have less stringent hiring practices. That's probably your best shot?

We often miss an important distinction between weather and climate. We don't have very good accuracy with weather year over year. Hell, we can't even predict the weather over the next 10 days, forget next year. Weather can wildly change week over week, year over year. Climate on the other hand measures changes over vast periods of time, 50 years, 100 years, 10,000 years, etc. Those are easier to guess because they're at a global "macro" level. The concern regarding global warming is at the climate level, not the weather level. All the hoopla over global climate change is all around the climate temperature rising a mere few degrees over the next 100 years. Between now and then it's expected we'll have hot and cold spells varying from month to month, year to year. Record breaking cold snaps and hot snaps are just examples of changing weather. Looking at just single hot years and cold years in varying weather patterns is like a pharmaceutical focusing on but a few patients during a live human drug test and ignoring the 1,000 others.

You're either severely overestimating today's computing technology or severely underestimating human brain power. Scratch that, you're most likely severely doing both. As of today, computers are only good at reproducing very specific tasks and doing them extremely well (most times). Solving massive computational problems does not equate intelligence!!!!

Intelligence: Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Like countless folks have already said, modern computational technology has barely touched the surface of intelligence. There's no scratch there yet, not even a finger print blemish. You'll struggle to make comparisons with even the dumbest living organism on earth, like for instance the amoeba, against the likes of today's AI. I for one don't expect we'll make any major break-through in AI until we actually figure out how our own damned brains work.