It becomes a much deeply recursive movie once you realize Eldon Tyrell was a replicant.

From the look of things, this is already happening:

http://www.terapeak.com/blog/2...

When I was in college, one of my CS professors had a weekly quiz that he called "Iron Code." It required you to write a (relatively simple) program, and submit it, using a custom utility (I forget the details; this was 15+ years ago now)...but you only got one shot. Your grade was based upon the degree to which your program's output in response to various inputs met the specifications. If it didn't even compile, you got a zero.

I was so-so at this activity, but there were a fair number of students in the class who consistently got high marks.

Humans can be taught not to make errors. It just requires more time and more careful attention to detail. It's not sexy, and it's usually not fun, but it's totally possible, and if it's your job, then you can damn well do it.

I'm just glad it's not mine, because patience and attention to detail are not my strong suits. :-)

Dan Aris

"Two chimps in a wicker basket, you think that's really clever, don't you boy?"

Free will is not an easy app to code.

You may be onto something . . . .

Is there any godforsaken human with an IQ above a doorknob who still hasn't the read the greatest SF book of all time, Iain Banks incredible book, The Player of Games?????

Rimshot!

I pretty much agree. I'm an old-time Unix and Linux user, but Unity works pretty well for me. It mostly manages to get out of the way of my work - the single most important feature of any desktop - and things such as the single menu gives me vertical space for another line or two worth of visible code.

There are some real irritants. The window/app switcher has never gotten the distinction right (and I don't think it's possible), and the quick search misses things it should find. But these are smaller irritants on a desktop that does what it should do - be invisible unless I explicitly need any of it.

My wife has a $100 color HP printer; each ink refill costs $60 but she's become attached to it. The printer won't print unless it's a "genuine HP cartridge" with DoD level 5 DRM and ink that costs more than Zafrio Anejo tequila laced with polonium 210. It should be spraying powdered rubies, emeralds, and sapphire, not marked-up food coloring. And when their overpriced black cartridge runs out, they trick you into wasting all your remaining cartridges by combining all three to make black.

I ended up pulling my ten year old laser printer out of the closet (tucked next to a ten year old Win XP laptop), got a third party drum cartridge for $15, and now I can print things without having to decide whether it's worth the ink.

Carly Fiorina left HP's reputation lying in pieces on a seafloor before she switched to a more appropriate career. Now we have Satya Nadella who is synergistically pumping Microsoft's reputation down a fracking well. After Microsoft fully transitions its business model from software to cable compary fuckery,, he'll change careers and become a Senator.

And this has happened in every industry invented within 30 years.

Any rational interpretation would suggest that when rich people and large corporations buy or pay off the loan on a congressperson, they own it, and should be free to get whatever legislation out of it they see fit. Least of all should they have to deal with interference from busybody economists trying to tell them what's "rational."

Dan Aris

... since that defense corporation is majority owned by the Bush family and James Baker.

... after having saved this law firm in Seattle, Bogle and Gates, some bucks when I was an IT contractor there, I applied for a position which opened in their tech support department. For some peculiar reason, instead of hiring me, a tried and true quantity, they opted to instead hire a woman who had been fired from two previous jobs in San Francisco --- for embezzling.

One day the partners arrived at work to find all their operating funds had disappeared, and today Bogle and Gates is no more since they dissolved the firm without any operating funds to continue on. (Maybe crooks hire crooks, after all, considering who that Gates was the grandfather to?)