What exactly does the author mean by "short term" in this context? Many scientists talk about how life on earth has only been around for a relatively short period relative to the age of the universe. So, in theory, short-term stability may provide plenty of time for life to evolve to a level similar to our own.

is just a reduced form of math for those with limited talents in abstraction.

Or, more precisely, human descendents who had emigrated to space early had experienced more rapid evolution than those who did so later. Their society's definition of "human" evolved with them to the point that their robots didn't recognize humans from later waves of colonization as human, even though they were subject to the three laws.

This was in the last R. Daneel Olivaw book, which I believe was "Robots and Empire".

Never could stomach the first person shooter, going back to the first Wolfenstein that a friend had loaded on his 386. Shaky-cam movies have the same effect. I understand that about 15% of people get nauseated, and I've had to leave my eyes shut 80% of the time during movies where I wasn't expecting the technique (at least not for the whole movie.)

I usually just avoid movies that are shot hand held start to finish (I'm okay for a few minutes.) I keep hoping that the fad will come to a natural end, but I'm curious why producers would want to cut out 10-15% of their potential audience for a movie like "Edge of Tomorrow" or any of the other recent tent pole movies that use it.

I also haven't read whether there is any difference in the incidence of the condition among younger audiences raised on games. Anybody have any insight?

It's not a question of whether this would be better than current treatments. The problem comes from the fact that getting something a little bit better will prevent them from providing something a lot better. Right now, there is a surgery, called a duodenal switch (DS), which has upwards of a 95% cure rate for diabetes. It was originally developed for weight loss, but the combination of its affect on the production of gherlin and the malabsorption of calories it induces has been shown repeatedly to offer a permanent cure for diabetes. The treatment has been around for over a decade, and is used in many places in Europe as a treatment for diabetes. Here, since it was initially classified as a weight-loss surgery, insurance companies claim that it's elective and won't authorize it for patients whose BMI is under 50.

I developed diabetes a little over a decade ago. At the time, my weight was well within the healthy range, I was a dance instructor and working out 4-6 times a week. Both of my grandmothers and my father were diabetic, though, so I got a double dose of genetic predisposition. The first symptom I had, though, was the sudden onset of neuropathy in my feet.

The primary downsides to the DS are the need to take vitamin supplements for life and go to the doctor to get blood levels checked every 6 months and a risk of disagreeable flatulence if you eat certain foods. Given that I would be able to give up injections and several other medications that I am already taking on a daily basis, and am visiting the doctor every 6 months anyway for bloodwork, I'll trade gas for diabetes. The surgery would pay for itself in about 3 years, and I would be able to live a much more normal life, not only eating more normally, but not having friends and relatives obsessing over my eating at social events, being able to go out for a beer after work without worrying about having to adjust my medicine and food intake for the next 12 hours, and not having to skewer my fingers and arms multiple times each day for testing and injections.

By and large, though, someone like me with type 2 diabetes would not only be able to eat normally, but also stop taking hundreds of dollars worth of medicine each month and prevent further damage to nerves, kidneys and eyes. The surgery runs from around $8000 to $15,000. It would seemingly save the insurance companies money over the course of 3-5 years for someone like me, given the amount they claim to be spending on my medication, BUT that is not the calculus the insurance company is using.

Since BCBS also has its subscribers locked in to its mail order pharmacy, anything that would reduce the cost of my monthly medication is a threat to their profits. Their actual cost of medication has nothing to do with the "List Price" they show on the receipts. I would be very surprised if there are any medications that their cost exceeds the copay they extract from their subscribers, but it would be impossible to prove, given the fictitious transfer costs that insurers and drug companies report. I would suggest, though, that the cost of drugs in foreign countries is a good place to look for their true costs to the insurer, because, if the pharmaceutical firm can afford to sell a drug profitably for $20 in Canada, I suspect the $300+ List Price in the US is a bit padded, and that the $45/month my insurer charges for a copay leaves them with a profit margin they would rather protect than do what would be in my best interests.

I plan to pay for the surgery out of pocket as soon as possible, but I resent the damage done to my body from having to wait years to do so because the institution responsible for my health care is less worried about my quality of life than their own profits.

Engineering is probably okay, but the main reason it's profitable is because of the math component that many people find scary. Even people who like math can get bored with reworking the same basic calculations day after day for slightly different scenarios. Furthermore, these aspects are already being automated, with the result that jouneyman engineers are in the same boat as journeyman bookkeepers were in the '80's.

However, those engineering calculations have to be applied to designs for new products, ranging from paper clips to jumbo jets. Two fields I would consider are industrial design and marketing. Industrial design is about to become a cottage industry, as computer assisted manufacturing and 3D printing make it easier to create custom products and distribute production to inexpensive local "factories." Product designers will be able to sell their designs directly to consumers without the being tied to traditional corporate production lines.

Marketing is not just advertising and promotion. A company's marketing department is responsible for everything from market discovery (what would people be willing to pay us for?) to product development (what's the best combination of features and aesthetics to put into a product?) to logistics (how do we get raw materials to our plants and finished goods to market). I'm not a fan of the branches of marketing that revolve around "selling people things they don't want because its what we make," but most areas of marketing require creativity and intelligence. Some areas require math (especially statistics) or artistic skills (verbal, graphic or sculptural). Moreover, marketing generally doesn't require you to sell your soul to the devil*, unlike accounting, law and finance.

*other than Advertising and Promotion.

Back in the days before SCO was sold to dark side patent trolls. SCO was my father's OS of choice.

There are a lot of comments here that are not very charitable, but, then, it IS Slashdot (Where the elite come to snark.)

Many people know that they would like to be able to use a computer to do something for which there are currently no apps available. They also know that the subject matter knowledge that they have would take years for a programmer to learn, and more investment of effort than most people would be willing to make. Their knowledge is every bit as critical as that of the programmer, and every bit as difficult to fully understand. They may not need a marketable app with all manner of multimedia extensions, don't foresee a sufficient market to cover the cost of a professional programmer, or else they do not believe that a programmer can get up to speed on the particulars of their problem to see all of the potential pitfalls any faster than they can get up to speed on the programming side of the problem. Coding expertise is valuable, but it is not the only valuable aspect of a program.

The great mass of non-programmers only hear the marketing news that makes it to the mainstream media, which usually consists of statements about how much easier programming is with product X. They, not unjustifiably, assume that after 25 years of such announcements, programming languages must be much easier and more powerful than they were when they took Basic in high school, 20 years ago.

Combine that with the archetypal image many people have in the back of their minds about computing, the Enterprise computer from Star Trek, and futurists promising computers with natural language interfaces (bolstered by commercials featuring Siri) and it's not unreasonable for them to believe that it may be possible for them to attempt a more complex problem than they are able to with current tools. They aren't meaning to be insulting when they think it should be easier. They are just going on the information they have and trying to figure out what their most efficient option is, between the frustration of learning to code, and the frustration of working with a coder on a project where they will have to teach a coder about all of the ins and outs of their discipline. All of the time that you spent learning to code, of which you are justifiably proud, an architect or engineer spent learning about structure, a doctor spent learning about medicine, a linguist spent learning about language.

To a coder, the app is the solution to a problem. To the user, the app is just a tool that may help them find a solution. To them, the coder only sees a small part of the big picture, and may have no commitment to what they understand as the real issue.

The suggestion that you as a professional coder could master their expertise sufficiently to solve their problem over the course of a project may be every bit as insulting to them as their belief that programming may be something they could learn over the course of a project is to you.

I'm pretty sure Crashmark was being sarcastic. I doubt anybody reading slashdot is questioning the inevitability of such a fundamental automating technology any more than they are lamenting the demise of the buggy whip industry.

. . . at least according to my Dad, who started programming in the late sixties.

"NASA used it to put a man on the moon, dammit. I doubt your projects are more complicated than that, so it should be all you ever need. (Unless you're writing a business application, of course. Then you should use COBOL.)"

It already does. If a patient is brain dead, we usually take it off life support. The mother of a fetus is effectively a life support system, from the fetus' perspective. Being human is not simply a matter of DNA. Ask a twin if they're an individual, separate from their sibling. It's a matter of cognition, and there are grey areas. The closer to human levels of cognition we perceive, the more the death of an organism troubles us. Seeing a dog die is more traumatic than seeing a mouse die, because dogs' behavior leads us to believe that they understand and value the world in ways that are similar to ourselves. Conversely, most cultures execute certain criminals, depriving them of their lives because the values they place on community norms shows that their ethical understanding is outside of the bounds of what is accepted as human norms.

Up to a certain point, a fetus does not have a sufficiently complex brain to be able to encode a sufficiently human model of the world for many people to consider it human. It does not have language. It has not encoded experiences. It is not aware of others. Meanwhile, it's life is parasitic to the mother, who, in almost all cases, fully meets the qualifications for being human. Since we are anthropocentric, outside of specific indoctrination, people tend to value the continued life of the mother more than that of the child. If the mother accepts the fetus as a part of herself, it should be protected, as we would the mother. But, if the mother chooses otherwise, her claim to her body and health are superior to other people's claim that she should risk both for an ideal that she doesn't share.

If it were possible to transplant a fetus, perhaps the arguments would be different. Perhaps the anti-choice contingent should spend their money on that, rather than campaigns to traumatize young women who are in a situation that is untenable, often through no fault of their own, where their lives must end, regardless of their dreams, aspirations, and preparations otherwise. The family and children they may have planned might not be born because the pregnancy they did not want cut them off from the community they would have otherwise joined. Maybe they are cut off from their family. Maybe they wind up never going to college, or even finishing high school. Maybe rather than being a self-sufficient engineer raising two honor roll children with a husband, she winds up as a single mother in a series of dead-end jobs, with no family leave, so that her child has to raise himself in the kind of environment a minimum wage job affords. It's true that a child like that can turn out okay, with a mother so dedicated to the child's welfare that she denies herself the opportunities to fulfill any of her own dreams, but a woman with that attitude is unlikely to have gone to the abortion clinic in the first place. Whether a woman decides the wrong time to have a child, the wrong father, or a she feels that the risk to her physical or emotional life is too great, society should respect her decision.

. . . or at least suggest that you qualify your statement.

At it's inception, Dell was quite innovative. But that innovation was limited to business practices, not engineering or technology. Compaq got the ball rolling, but Dell developed the production and marketing models that brought the price of usable desktop computers down to the sub-$1000 level. This was probably as instrumental in putting a computer on every desktop as anything Bill Gates did. Other manufacturers copied and improved upon the model later, but Dell's decisions not only made computers more affordable, but also introduced to a generation concepts that are now considered mainstream (CPU, RAM, etc.), but which had been considered indecipherable techy arcana. I believe this significantly increased computer adoption, simply by demystifying the strange beige boxes.

These may not have been technological innovations, but they were definitely innovations, and led to the kind of "creative destruction" so often given lip service by conservatives (whose actual practices are mostly about maintaining market stability and the fortunes of those who have already won them, rather than innovation.)

The segment was online Monday. There was a link from The Daily Kos. Oliver also suggested that "net neutrality" sounded too borring to get people interested, and suggested the more accurate "Prevent Cable Company F*^kery" to describe the legislation.

No, you're mistaken. An active outbreak of a disease increases the likelihood of mutation, which may create a strain that cannot be contained by the current vaccine. Even if the vaccinated will not catch the current iteration of the disease, they may be susceptible to whatever new horror results from giving this iteration free reign to evolve into something more deadly.

NextStep felt intentional and complete in a way that I haven't seen since. It wasn't aping anything else on the market, it wasn't trying to be different just for the sake of product differentiation, and it didn't have extraneous bells and whistles for the sake of giving the marketing department something to talk about. It was just a well-thought-out environment for getting real work done.