$ cat > test.c
printf("Hello, wold!");
$ gcc test.c
test.c:1:8: error: expected declaration specifiers or ‘...’ before string constant

Given that it doesn't even compile, I'd say it's buggy as hell.

Or rather than eliminating it, secure it. A couple of proposals:

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ provides a distributed mechanism for near real-time monitoring of certificates in use, to very quickly identify and block certificates that weren't issued legitimately.

http://convergence.io/ makes the observation that MITM attacks result in some subset of the Internet seeing a different certificate from a given server. A distributed system of crosschecks identifies sessions which are being attacked.

Note that in spite of the fact that Convergence is billed as a replacement for the CA system, there's no reason that we can't use both.

Neither was the AC to whom you replied. Gameplay testing can and should be automated.

Oh, one more point: I should mention that it seems pretty likely that once we understand how human learning works, we will actually not program machines to learn the same way; we'll program them to learn a better way.

I think you're probably right... but we can't prove it since we don't yet know how human learning works. Once we do know how human learning works, we will be able to program machines to learn the same way.

And all of their personal and business correspondence, and access to their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, password managers (though access to someone's e-mail is generally sufficient to get into everything else on-line), etc. Your phone can also tell someone where you go (navigation history) and if you have it turned on can even provide them with a detailed account of where you have been, every minute of every day.

The aggregate content of a smart phone is, for many people, everything about them worth stealing.

Predictive power is necessary, but not sufficient.

I don't agree that it's "the most fundamental criterion", because it's not a matter of weighing various criteria, some more important than others, and saying "yep, this theory is good enough, it's a keeper". Instead, all of the criteria must be met. An explanation must make verifiable predictions, those predictions must be borne out, the explanation must not be easily variable to accommodate any observations and must imply its own reach.

As to your example, QM doesn't say that systems only behave quantum mechanically below a certain scale. They behave that way at all scales... it's just that at larger scales the collective probability of observing the quantum "weirdness" is so low that it effectively never happens. At least in most cases: Young's experiment shows that QM behavior can be quite apparent at larger scales.

FWIW, I don't consider QM to be an ugly theory at all. In particular, I find the many-worlds interpretation of QM to be quite elegant and beautiful -- though still quite brain-twisting and very different from our common conception of the world. But then, frankly, classical atomic theory is also quite alien to our common conception of reality. For example, the notions that solid matter is nearly all empty space and that the fact that we can't walk through walls is actually due to counterposing fields not because the matter of my forehead and the wall really "collide". The notion that we live on a spherical body rotating around the sun is also quite counter-intuitive, frankly. It only seems clear and obvious because we're used to it. So degree of match with human perceptions of reality isn't really a useful yardstick.

Interestingly, I think beauty and elegance are useful yardsticks, though, because they tend to bear precisely on the "hard to vary" characteristic of good explanatory theories. The more complex a theory the less elegant and beautiful it is, and the more "knobs" there are to tweak to explain different observations. Current explanations of subatomic particle physics are deeply unsatisfactory... and not only are they ugly, with their explosion of seemingly random types of particles, we don't have explanations that tell us why we observe all of those particles and not others or (with some exceptions) what all of the other particles may be. This lack of reach and excess of variability indicates that we don't really have a scientific explanation of subatomic particle physics, even though we can make some predictions.

Assuming one can *find* said .22LR.

Not completely true. There is value in having developers who are from the countries where you sell your products because their understanding of the local culture and context can help them to design and build products better suited to the customer base. But assuming you address that issue (or just don't care about it), yeah, dev shops can be anywhere and everywhere.

No, it doesn't. Oh, the diameter of the bullet is very similar, but it's longer, heavier and moving much, much faster and therefore carrying an order of magnitude more kinetic energy. Of course I'm comparing to the ubiquitous .22 LR, but the comparison doesn't change much if you step up to the .22 magnum, and the difference is even larger if you look at the .22 short.

Heh. I don't particularly *want* to feel it. But I do think we'd be better off if everyone did... and also got an accounting of how their money was spent.