Fair enough - you did cite the sources. That said, you still have a problem (which you have not resolved), and I should've pointed it out earlier: none of what you quoted is contradictory or an endorsement of what you intimate.

Mark 10:21 was a challenge to a wealthy man, who subsequently failed said test. Luke 14:26 is a statement as to how you should prioritize Christianity over the objections/demands of anyone else, including your own family. 1 Timothy 2:12 is your closest to an actual argument, but it only concerns the role of women in the church itself (and the reason why, for instance, there are no female priests in the Catholic Church). 1 Peter 2:18 was written when slavery was common, and yet it held/holds true - it also aligns perfectly with the Gospels, in which all Christians are to love their enemies, be kind to those who harm you, work the extra mile, etc.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum: All of what you quoted can be followed without contradiction *or* violation.

Here's the fun part - applying it to robots; the first two are superfluous, since robots have no property rights or family, though the lessons could still apply. The third fails because gender in that context is a human-specific thing, and so robots could simply relegate that as a human-only thing. The fourth is the only relevant verse you provided, and I'd damned sure want a robot to hold to it.

Nice try on the pre-emptive "cherry pick" charge BTW, but the burden is now on you to prove that I did such a thing. ;)

One would hope that a good manager would have enough practical and direct experience in writing software to at least come up with a half-decent estimate, no?

Most shops I've seen lately have the scrum masters spend a part of a planning session simply asking individual contributors "Here's a rough outline of the proposed project [...] now how long do you think doing that will take", and they come up with an estimate adjustment from there... most of the time, it's fairly close. PMs pad things a little of course, but the results tend to be fairly close.

YMMV of course... depends on who is posting the final estimates - is it devs, or is it the MBAs.

(If it's the latter, run like hell.)

I never said that 'my' path is the "original path" - I said that humankind has perverted the original ideal; nobody escapes this statement.

Also, I noticed that in your haste to quote scripture, you made a rather large mistake.

Anyone can mine quotes, but unless you provide the context for each, you have no strength in your argument.

No, no self-respecting AI developer will use .NET. Get that thought out of your head right this instant.

It's not as simple as you surmise. As a Christian, I don't perceive that God stops by and literally vocalizes "...dude, you need more beer in the fridge! No, I'm okay, it's just that this week was a monster what with the whole planetary re-org over by Praxis IV, but you don't want to hear about that, promise. So how about those Trail Blazers last week?" Instead, the communication that does occur is a lot more ephemeral and IMHO a form of meta-communication, and it doesn't even involve presence at times.

If you think about it, communicating with the Almighty is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize - some never do. Human technology simply does not have the means to record the common, everyday stuff that most folks experience in their lifetime, and saints/prophets/saviors/miracles are very few and far between. It took Mother Teresa a very long time before she came to the realization, and if anybody deserved to have a straight-up chat with Him while she was in this world...

I do agree though - anyone who tells me "God spoke to me last night, and said..." is going to be met by me with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damned block of it.

TL;DR - not every Christian walks around claiming to have a two-way communication line open to the Divine. I daresay the majority of us claim no such thing.

This is true... and in this case, if robots are going to have any sort of religion, Christianity ain't a bad way to go (mind you: I mean it as originally proposed, not as perverted by humanity since.)

On the other hand, Isaac Asimov covered this very nicely in I, Robot (in the book, not the abortion of a movie.) The specific short story within the book is here.

...and then first-person shooters were invented, at which point dial-up immediately began to suck ass. :p

(I remember when a 180ms ping was something you *bragged* about...)

I agree, but only insofar as they really screwed the pooch on how they ran this.

A more intelligent method would be to give the ISPs a choice:

* treat all inbound/outbound user traffic equally (excluding obvious DDoS or similar), and retain full immunity from lawsuits caused by user activity (basically become a full common carrier).

-or-

* do what you want insofar as traffic shaping, but know that you do so without any DMCA Safe Harbor protection, and get no immunity from lawsuits or crimes caused by user activity. Why? Because if you modify/inspect user traffic, you gain and share a measure of legal responsibility for it.

You give the ISPs that choice. They can change their minds once every three years, but otherwise they should get those two choices, and no other. I'm willing to bet that the ISPs would rush to become common carriers in a heartbeat, since there's no way they could collude with every copyright holder on the planet to avoid lawsuits.

What they have now is the top of a very slippery slope... and I don't care what party runs the government, either of them will happily abuse the privelege farther on down the road as things get more burdensome.

Because I want to save a few warheads for parts of California (specifically Sacramento, parts of LA County...)

Now? We used to have them in the USAF in the barracks. Beer only, but still, there it was.

They got rid of them in 1988-89 IIRc.

As long as you don't demand that one provide you with sex...

But then, that's a whole other ethical bucket of fish.

To be fair, two things:

1) Most of Apple's patents are on hardware, and design patents aren't uncommon at all among big corps that make and sell tangible stuff (see also the Auto industry).

2) Apple got this way because they were IP-raped pretty hard in their early years (with Microsoft being among the more notable thieves).

s'okay, I'm all stocked up for popcorn on that one.

Although, wouldn't it just save us some time if we just nuked East Texas from orbit?

Yeah! Take the latest federal judge in good ol' Marshall TX, Judge James Rodney Gilstrap - he was nominated by that great champion and bastion of the Republican party... err, Barack Obama. He was confirmed by the Senate in 2011, when the joint was run by that other massive bastion of conservative GOP morality, err, Sen. Harry Reid. :/

Here's an idea - how about you do some, I dunno, research, before you spout partisan politics.

True indeed.

On the one hand, they're paying for the employee's time, so as long as the tracking can be removed/ended as the employee leaves, it's within their legal bounds to do so. On the other hand, given that employees can get creative as hell when it comes to slacking off, I don't see how this is going to be very effective.

It's like when they moved to an open office (as in "you can see everyone's screens") plan at Intel as a pilot "How We Work" program a few years ago. They figured it would increase collegiality, increase productivity, etc etc. Turns out that the area of the building where they ran that pilot was a frigging ghost town, with the assigned occupants hiding somewhere quiet to get some work done. Other alternatives were to come up with sudden justifications for working remotely, and scheduling conference rooms just to go be somewhere quiet for awhile that didn't have as many eyeballs on you and what you were doing. Not even free soda fountains parked right next to the area could lure folks back to their desks.

I'd worked in a similar type of office later on, and honestly, it kind of sucked. Auditing file shares for pr0n/mp3s/illicit files with HR had to be done in a conference room, the noise levels otherwise were louder than usual (headphones were pretty much required if you wanted to work quietly), and it was kind of odd having my manager sitting 3' away from me all day long in between meetings (on the plus side, I only had to elbow him if I needed something.)

All that aside, they've been trying to come up with ways to monitor employees for years: timesheets, RFID badges, workstation monitoring (even down to keyloggers on certain sensitive employees' workstations), email/proxy logs, you-name-it. Most have failed to live up to expectations due to cost or ease of circumvention. Short of hiring a human monitor/proctor for each employee (or small group thereof) to watch and record what they do, you're simply not going to get much more productivity out of your employees than you get now - I daresay you'll end up with less because they'll be spending more time trying to circumvent or cheat all the bullshit you've put into place to track them.