The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

That is a flatly ludicrous requirement, far in excess of what we would ever even consider applying to determine if even a human being is intelligent or not. Hell, if you were to apply that standard to human beings, ironically, many extremely intelligent people would fail that metric, because in hindsight, you can very often identify precisely how a particular thought or idea came out of a person.

I'd be more inclined to trust the article if they hadn't claimed the moon is 40 earth diameters away from the earth...

The moon's far side take the hit from lots more objects. That's why the far side looks like it does. This article explains why the near side looks different - i.e., has more distinct maria.

... are formed, then could you algorithmically synthesize that process with your own mind to help you remember things? Seems like this could present a foolproof way to bypass a lie detector if possible, since you could synthesize the memory of the event that you want to lie about, and form it in your brain as if it were a real memory so that you no longer can appear to be lying about it.

Florida and Connecticut are where P&W does the engine assembly, parts probably come from all over the US and NATO countries.

When the mere act of *remembering* something can amount to creating a diigtal copy of it because of a brain implant, can copyright even continue to exist?

Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change

The West Antarctic Ice Shelf has already begun its collapse, guaranteeing us 10-12ft of sea level rise over the next 50-200 years (only the timeframe, not the result, remains in question). We have officially lost our "shot at preventing devastating climate change".

We do, however, still have a shot at preventing the necessary abandonment of every major coastal city on the planet, by avoiding another 200ft of sea level rise that would result from the rest of Antarctica melting.

At this point, we need to stop asking how we can go green, and start planning for our new seaside vacation homes in Arizona.

Hypercard included the code, which, once you got anything significant done, you would likely either need to or want to tweak. As nice as Stagecast is for introducing kids to creating things, they never did the part where you see the code behind it. We used Hypercard for a good dozen years and got a lot of kids (in a STEM school setting) hooked on being able to make things. Same thing happened with LOGO ten years earlier. MYST and Voyager Expanded Books were both built from HyperCard - so yes, it could make useful commercial things.

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs. This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on todayâ(TM)s web. What a waste. Twenty years of expediency has led the web into a technical debt crisis."

I know, right? We had it so much easier back when we could just write our own interrupt handler (and pray we didn't step on DRAM refresh or vice-versa) to pull bytes directly off the 8250 - And once we had those bytes, mwa-hahaha! We could write our own TCP stack and get the actual data the sender intended, and then do... something... with it that fit on a 40x25 monochrome text screen (yeah, I started late in the game, those bastards working with punchcards spoiled all the really easy stuff for me!).

And now look where we've gone: Anyone using just about any major platform today can fire up a text editor and write a complete moderately sophisticated web app in under an hour. Those poor, poor bastards. I don't know how I can sleep at night, knowing what my brethren have done to the poor wannabe-coders of today. Say, do I hear violins?

Look up the term autism and understand why the author used that term.

Because it has become a meaningless buzzword used to describe every introverted snowflake on the planet?

The GP responded more-or-less appropriately to the TFA's nonsense. You have simply said "nuh-uh!". Substantiate, please.

Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software.

I've said that for years. You, however, seem to hold that against those with the rare gift and dedication to code. Kinda missing the point, dude.


a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication. The way things are today if you want to be a programmer you had best be someone like me on the autism spectrum who has spent their entire life mastering vast realms of arcane knowledge â" and enjoys it

Yes, yes, yes, kinda, yes, and yes. Again - Your point? You've described exactly why normal humans will never succeed as devs, and to a degree, why many devs tend to look down on those who can't even figure out Excel.

And you call that "injustice"? I have a rare combination of qualities that let me do seemingly amazing things with computers, and in return, I make a decent (but by no means incredible) salary. You want injustice? Some of those same morons who can't even figure out Excel (much less writing their own override CSS) make millions of dollars per year telling me they want my latest app to use a differerent font color. Another group of those morons make millions of dollars per year because they can whack a ball with a stick better than I can. Yet another group of morons make millions of dollars per year doing absolutely nothing because Granddad worked a town of white trash (sometimes literally) to death.

And yet you would call me out for busting my ass to turn my one natural skill into a modestly decent living?

Go fuck yourself, Mr. Edwards. Hard.

It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.

This case should not have anything to do with religion in the first place, people that run businesses must not be abused by the government and having their freedoms revoked just because they are running a business.

Government must not have any authority to dictate to people what type of compensation the employer and the employee agree upon. Government must not have any authority to dictate that compensation must be provided in a form of insurance or contraceptives or in form of any other product or currency that goes against the agreement between the actual 2 parties involved - a person buying labour and a person selling labour.

This is a win for freedom but not completely, because it mentions religion in the first place. Religion has nothing to do with this, it's about INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.

Insurance only works because of uncertainty. The very concept of getting people to buy insurance depends on aggregating risk over a sufficiently large population.

When the insurance companies can actually offer people rates that come within a small margin of actual payouts (plus a hefty bit extra for the insurance company's cut) - Why would any sane person still pay for insurance? Put the same money in the bank and cut out the middle-man.

Communism has been done correctly in the past, but never on a scale as large as a country.... at best, I think it has only been achieved at the scale of a modest community, and generally involving no more than a few thousand people or so.

Basically, when everyone in the community personally knows practically everyone else in it, there is a social obligation on everybody to conform to expected behavior on account of a complete lack of anonymity, and communism works. Individuals who do not fit in to such societies are unceremoniously kicked out and left to fend for themselves.