Before we knew the sun was the center of the universe, someone believed it was true and went to prove it. There's nothing wrong with believing. The problem is when you assert your belief in spite of significant evidence to the contrary, and/or impose your belief as a system of law or social acceptability. In this case however there is no existence proof, what AI that exists doesn't come close yet.

I agree with OP, I find it hard to believe we're just machines in a simulation. I don't want to believe it, mostly, and it has nothing to do with religion. I do understand that most of our bodies are chemistry and physics, and have no doubt those realities shape a good amount of our behavior. I think attempting to create an AI, either cloned from us, or modeled after us, is essential to understanding exactly what OP describes as "irreducible complexity". But I think what we'll find is a new form of science, something physics and chemistry won't initially be able to explain. Perhaps something like quantum physics, that can't be explained deterministically and can only be bounded with probability functions, but without which, when forced into a deterministic state, radically alters the perception of the whole.

There is an issue with lack of customization, a big one. But that's different than not being able to close a program you are done with. Definitely you should be able to completely kill a program, not just "demand kill" it.

Afaik both android and iOS have ways of doing this that are very simple.

I want to not need cygwin. I want to not have to deal with / vs \, and C: versus /mount. I don't want to have to write small utilities and have to push a cygwin.dll so people can use them (or even know what cygwin is).

Basically I want Windows to be functional out of the box for real work, not just playing games or powerpoint.

Or more accurately, the marketing types assess the "price point" of the device they want to sell. The engineers job is to figure out how to maximize the profit (difference between cost of goods, and "price point"). The price point MAY drop, if price wars are a factor and companies think they have a chance to profit enough to run their competitor out of the market, believing their engineers/supply chain have "innovated" more than the other guy.

That's not the apple market though, they are happy being luxury goods and letting the chinese shitshops duke it out on price and destroy each other.

I sent in my request that Win10 supports bash or even csh like Linux and OS X. But instead we have powershell, which has absolutely no value to me as a hw/sw engineer. I'm not really looking for a new way to lock in, I'm looking for a way that the OS becomes useful again, rather than a beast i'm forced to use for certain company's games.

Sometimes you get the feeling they don't really want feedback, they want bug reports or free marketing.

I'm a working Electrical Engineer. I know at least the domain I have worked in (Systems, PCB, IC package design, Signal Integrity), and i know the reasons I've been trying to recreate myself as a something else, and why doing that that jacked my salary by 30%, in spite of not being qualified for that move.

If I discourage anyone from pursuing this degree, I have done both them a favor, and those who really love this and will do it anyway. Once upon a time I wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer, and at career day someone explained the situation almost exactly as I have. I was angry, thought bad things of them, but they were right, and I listened and did well for myself. In truth, Aerospace Engineering was neat, and I probably would have done fine, but I didn't really love it like my friend who works at (big helo company) loves it and who endures the interminable layoffs and uncertainty.

If you have the intellectual capacity to succeed in this field, chances are you enjoy many things and can succeed in ANY field, you just need the intel to know what the smart decisions are. If you're flexible, then you should exercise that flexibility carefully.

In terms of that article, that's just about placement rate. That doesn't mean you'll get a job you want, or that explains to you why you dealt with years of differential equations, phasors, and the 15th different explanation of the Fourier Transform just so that you can create a spreadsheet that lists outstanding manufacturing defects that Foxconn is responsible for, almost certainly because they insisted on using local part sources rather than those from Western companies that still design things right (what few still exist). The highlight of your career may be creating a powerpoint explaining how to create an engineering model that maximally leverages your western designers to train their replacements in asia, in a fashion that guarantees timely product delivery. This isn't bitterness, this is real life.

Electrical Engineering is still in demand, if you're willing to travel a lot and be a manager/"architect" type. It is not, however, sustainable as a career, you will forget almost everything important about the field within the first 5 years after leaving college, and then just be another faceless middle manager pushing spreadsheets around. There are a few companies that still want EEs: like em or hate em, Apple hires them and they do actual EE work. Defense still wants them, and signal integrity/RF guys are still in heavy demand (although they must fight the push I note above).

If you want an engineering degree just to get a job and be a corporate drone, it's still a great degree to get. But don't pay a lot of money, your wages will not justify it and you'll end up paying college loans the rest of your life. If you want to be a real engineer, analyze your chances of being in the top 10%, if you don't think you can be or won't work hard enough for it, get out, find something else you enjoy more.

Was his name John Thomas of St. Peter's, famous son of Richard Burns?

Absolutely, I had a sentence that I chopped out that was something like 8:4:1 Test:Layout:schematics. ESD & environment are a big part of test and a large part of layout. But it's frequently hard to express these topics to non-HW engineers, it sounds like black magic or mysterious bugs.

ESD has the whole topic of "latent defects", a device shocked but still works and ends up with a radically reduced lifetime that will often be blamed on the user.

As a hardware engineer who gets paid for it, I don't worry a second about anyone using Eagle (or better tools) destroying my value. If I had a dollar for every person who created some schematics that, even if they were correct (and usually they aren't close), totally didn't understand layout and manufacturing and made a huge mess, I could retire.

Before you can start to talk about open source electronics hardware, you have to talk about what kind of manufacturer you want to target. Some dude with a 3d printer is the wrong answer, even if his 3d printer could do PCBs (which I am sure will happen one day, and I'm excited about). One thing you learn real quick on the job, is that you will be limited by manufacturing capability, and you will do a lot of things to get around it or to live within it.

The one thing the world will learn from this experiment, should it be performed, is exactly how much time and energy goes in to a proper design even if the schematics don't change a bit.

While the other comment had some true statements to make, I also want to bring up that like most companies only a fraction of the profit makes it to the top. The rest is paid out, "lost", in wages, rent, endless suppliers & mfg/design equipment, etc. Money spent on frivolotities is much more helpful to the average guy than money "invested" in real-estate or stock. Real-estate investments, for example, tend to be incredibly hurtful to the majority of people who only see their rents/mortgages increase, and banks are only too eager to offer more balls and chains to working class homeowners. Corporate investments end up being part of some pyramid game of investor buyoffs that basically defines wall street: only a small portion of that makes it to the working class when it gets transformed into venture capital for new endeavors. Taxes may arguably be the best, in that civil servants tend to be relatively poorly paid and soak up a good hunk of that money, but they're the hardest weapon to wield, particularly with our current political climate. The only other option is inflation, which is very much a double edged sword.

So if you can convince some rich guy to pay $10k for a watch that probably cost $200 to make, you did real damn good, see if you can get him to also buy an overpriced car made out of solid gold, and possibly a trip to the moon.

Apple does do the best job of most tech corporations of hiring Americans, at least in the design phase, and they do manage some mfg in the US (but probably not on this product). The real problem is that our libertarian element has refused to allow us to construct laws that make it difficult/impossible for people utilizing slave labor in the far east to sell their products here. The problem is in our government, it is primarily in China, and it is also in the UN. As long as wage arbitrage remains a thing, we're stuck with this system and they best we can do is try to liberate rich-guy money via abusing him of his misplaced sensibilities.

I would hope someone like Linus did not have to spend even a nanosecond worrying about useless crap like this. Seems like an email I got today from some idiot entrepreneur trying to sell training courses about "The spread of negativity". Negativity is the best weapon against up-jumped stupids, or the worst: stupid by committee. I used to work for a company that "forbade" negative feedback. They hardly exist anymore, selling lousy products only a few customers buy. The problem was that they let everyone have a voice, even the stupids. There was no way to convince the stupids they were stupid. If you provided any data at all that was not in support of the stupidity, it was viewed as negative and not allowed in to the discussion. This is an example of rule by stupid, and while somehow the US government ekes by, it tends to ruin most serious endeavors. In my opinion, the best way of shooting down stupid is to publicly elucidate all the reasons their idea is stupid. They can either fix it if they're not as stupid as they appear, or because they're truly stupid, they can go away and stop bothering everyone which has a surprisingly high benefit to productivity.

It's shame if someone has to resort to racist/sexist/etc. remarks to explain to you why an idea is stupid, there are better ways. One should point out to them how stupid their feedback really is, if by invoking inalterable, irrelevant, and unsupportable facts of existence in a pejorative manner they undermine the goals of their own project. Assuming sufficient evidence is provided about the technical issues at hand, however, one should ignore the stupid commentary and focus on the evidence of technical stupidity, and either eliminate it if possible, or abandon the idea. But with any luck people who have a demonstrated track record of success can continue to tell you how stupid you are and not run afoul of the "rules". I say this and at one point in recent history I am fairly sure Linus threatened death on me and my kind, but he was right to do so, there was a lot of stupid-by-committee at work and it was making everything really stupid. Being threatened did very little to address the root cause of the problem, but it did highlight the symptoms that were previously being ignored because it was inconvenient to the stupids who had assumed role of alpha-geek. Those stupids did eventually back off, as it became clear their stupid was not being well tolerated by a community outside their control.

Exactly, if someone will pay $10k for a watch, and I know a lot of people with Rolex's, then why not an Apple watch? I'm sure Rolex is top-notch, but when you pay more than $100 for a watch you're paying for something beyond anything relating to keeping time. I hear all these crazy numbers about accuracy, but there is no practical value for that, you're really just buying a status symbol. So while the Apple watch does in fact do more than keep time, it's more or less irrelevant as you're paying for a label and a look anyway. Also, clearly you have a large amount of disposable income.

Finally, and this should be obvious to slashdot, helping rich people part with their money is generally good for 99% of all other people. If anything, we should be trying to identify and sell MORE overpriced needful things.

I guess I don't see how you can classify suicidal ideation as necessarily a symptom of a problem. It falls into roughly three categories for me: a) people who want to commit suicide because they're dying a slow, painful death and/or their quality of life is low; b) people who want to commit suicide because, after analyzing the situation and their needs for happiness, do not feel they can find happiness in a reasonable time frame; c) people who want to commit suicide because of some mental/chemical imbalance that could be repaired, and if repaired would give them a happy life.

Category "C" is the one which we'd like to jump in front of people and stop them, and give therapy a chance. In terms of category "a" and "b", I'd say we should facilitate it, offer a quick, painless way to go. The only trick is before we offer them the way out, we try o detect "c", and ensure that plans are in place to deal with financial & familial upheaval.

People look at suicide as a bad thing, I think primarily due to religious or traditional concerns, but I think that's a cruel mistake.

Shows what you know. That's not piss, you uncivilized clod, that's soupe pisse.