for a moment there, my brain processed the headline as "Michael Stonebraker passes Turing Test." Given how forgetful my wife claims I am, I then wondered if perhaps I had forgotten a couple of decades, and we were in some sort of future where we couldn't tell the difference between androids and humans anymore.

Then I took my second sip of coffee. I think today might be less productive, yet more entertaining, than I had predicted.

"This isn't being forced on anyone" - because it's in pilot phase, and they haven't yet had their lawyers and PR folks work out how to slip it past people without them knowing/caring. They're also trying to float the idea of it being a "feature" temporarily, to try to come up with a way to convince people it's a value-add (much easier than hiding it). Eventually though - maybe in as little as 6 months - it will be forced on everyone. Of that, you should be certain.

Do you *need* beer? Do you *need* steak vrs a bowl of red beans and rice? A nice bed in a comfortable house, instead of some straw on the floor of a cave? 99.99% of your life is "luxury." That said, I have had the Samsung Gear Fit since last fall (my previous phone was stolen just days after the S5 Active came out, so I got it and the Gear Fit). I've found the watch to be extremely helpful in many ways, and have even regained my very lost habit of occassionally checking my watch (I went what, almost 15 years without one) to actually know what time it is. Then there's the sleep patterns, exercise tracking, etc...

so and should be or?

It has *everything* to do with the complaint. They certify a breed. The clone is *not* a perfect equivalent, and will have problems that the parents did not impart, and that the original did not have. The primary (secondary, and tertiary) point of having a certified bloodline is to be able to have certainty of particular traits, and consistency. A clone won't have that - they'll have new, unique problems. Or maybe they'll be ok, but their children will have problems. Allowing them in as equal status *does* go against the entire (ethically highly questionable) purpose of the breed registry.

"(i.e., a perfect copy of a previous, 'natural-born' horse)" - it's not that. Not at all. Even if the horse lives, and seems to have a healthy life, and breeds...its children could have problems. Or maybe the clone will just be fine for 5 years, and suddenly have problems.

Your dna /ages/ in a sense. Unless you're cloning an infant, there are differences...and even then really, since even an infant has lost telomeres, and a variety of other things. If you cloned a blastocyst, it would probably be ok. Anything after that...problems occur, and we don't yet fully know why. More importantly, we don't know how to test for the potential problems, since we don't have a complete picture of what causes them. It is correct to exclude clones, in as much as it can be correct to worry about breed purity in the first place. You do understand that fields such as epigenetics and cloning in general are pretty much in their own infancy right now, right?

without saying the words, I was describing waterfall versus agile. If you come in from another field, you'll be doing waterfall. Then you haven't been corrupted by agile, thus you're still able to be a functional member of a team.

I'm not seeing people with a passion for doing software well, I'm seeing people who want to be superstars and want to be part of the Next Big Thing.

in all other engineering since the dawn of time, the engineer was presented a set of requirements, they then drafted a design they felt described the fulfillment of those requirements and presented it to the interested parties. Those parties agreed to it, then the engineer set to work completing the design documentation. Then junior engineers and workers would fulfill that design documentation. Then someone would make sure that the finished product still met the original requirements. Then everyone would go home.

Nowadays, CS grads are told that code writers are the only people who need to know anything about the product - they can start their own products, imagine new requirements along the way, document little to nothing, and never actually release something - just have snapshots of the code base they at a whim bequeath to the mere mortals scrambling at their feet.

Whenever I'm in the hiring seat, I give *substantial* preference to those who have done real things in their lives - things where communicating and meeting expectations were key, and where your efforts would be judged and evaluated. Anything from bar-tending to construction, really. Or maybe organized team sports, acting, music...? But a person that has done nothing other than flit around SF after a CS degree? No way in hell. So an EE over a CS? Heck yeah. Easier to teach a couple languages to a person who understands how to design things, than it is to un-teach stuff.

"read only" on those floppies was accomplished via a little plastic (physical) tab that could be toggled back and forth. A hole was either present, or not present, when a light attempted to shine through it and be seen on the other side. That mechanism was also hacked and subverted early on in floppy history

this - as a person with a parkinsonian disorder myself, mice and anything else with motion sensors (grrr...all phones) have become increasingly annoying and unproductive. While it takes some training, voice control can restore that productivity

did you install your DOS6.22 from floppy, or were you an alien? If you installed from floppy, why is it that you think it couldn't have had a virus?

I'm just staring at your comment and blinking, because...wow. Even if I ignore #1&2, #3..."and is typically only an issue for calendaring and scheduling." How about queuing? How about clustering? How about expiration of millions of things (tokens, certs, leases, etc). How about practically everything your computer is doing? Unless you're meaning to say that everything really does boil down to "calendaring" and "scheduling," and you're not just making some Outlook comment. If timing wasn't important, there wouldn't be circuits dedicated to keeping it, on practically every electronic device on the planet.

you, know - you're right. Instead of having a simple, lightweight protocol that keeps time accurate across the globe, to the tiniest portion of a second...we should have every single time-sensitive thing on every single machine everywhere re-write their own time service. That way, not only will everything suddenly become substantially more noisy, but risk factors will go through the roof and code complexity across all of the IT universe will dramatically increase! Or, we could just use the tiny, lightweight, extremely accurate tool that's been doing it very well for decades. Damn, such hard decisions...

gosh darn you, stealing my comment before I knew the thread existed...but yeah. Solutions looking for problems, problems looking for elimination. Redhat got me to drop out of being a member of several FUGs, even as someone who had gone to several FUDCons. Then everyone else jumped in (fark you upstart). So yeah, now I'm FreeBSD, having gone Linux in 93. I'll take non-binary logs, being able to recover from a failing startup, and actually controlling my system...thanks. Gosh, I guess I lost 2 seconds (not really, SSD anyone?)