The issue being that is *always* the case. In the early python 2 days, they thought the 'early' days were over. I haven't dealt with python 3 with sufficient depth to be keenly aware of any real gotchas, but the fact they decided to add back in the explicit unicode syntax is a sign that they have at least continued to indulge in flux to fix bad design decisions. In that specific case, I don't see a downside for the increased ability to have python2/3 agnostic code so I won't declare any example of breaking 3.x series code with that. It seems clear to me that the python language can't quite exercise enough restraint in their enthusiasm for their vision of improved syntax and features to walk away confident that code won't break in a couple of 3.x generations.

It's almost like a curse, the more popular and energetic a language implementation is, the more likely it is to experience some incompatible evolution.

As the hip kids would say 'un-pythonic'. It's sort of like how perl can be perfectly readable until people go and start using all the language features in 'clever' ways. Making a dict on the fly and indexing it in the same statement is the sort of thing I could see rendering python code hard to read and follow...

Python is a language that has a fascinating tendency to break python on version upgrades. Yes, there is very clearly the python 2 to python 3, but even python 2.3 to python 2.6 can create worlds of headaches.

But then again no language is perfect. Old C code is frequently hard to build on modern compilers, perl had a very long history of not needing anything to be touched but some of the disilliusionment in prel 6 has caused even perl5 to get a bit fidgety as of late.

It's the perfect libertarian excuse for corporate abuse. You don't have to go along with the abuse. You can just live like an Amish person and avoid the abuse if you really want to. It's all your "choice".

1) If you think a job is a right, you're wrong.

2) If you think any one company has to create jobs, you're wrong. In fact, they are legally bound to provide shareholder value in most cases, which usually trumps any kind of inefficient workforce.

3) I, certainly, am not obliged to create a job for you either.

Thus, translating that to "poverty isn't my problem" is a bit facetious and misleading.

And the guys throwing rocks, they'll be wondering why no employer will touch them in a year's time. The Luddites may have had cause to be upset, but they were pretty much gone shortly after - because there's only so long you can protest about not having a job before you have to go find another, or before the law steps on you.

Nobody is claiming that this solves world poverty - what we're saying is that automation is an inevitable, and fairly logical, consequence of simple economics. Nobody hand-makes clothes any more, nobody fires their own bricks or builds their own stone-walling, nobody bakes their own bread, or keeps their own animals - not on anything but a hobbyist scale. There's a reason for that, and to deny that is to not see simple logic.

If you work in any kind of production industry currently reliant on human input which isn't specialised, but where you can easily imagine a robot doing the same job, then you will lose your job eventually. Anything else is actually quite stupid to conceive.

The trick is to not be restricted to jobs that are unskilled. Go to school, learn a trade, work your arse off, or be prepared to be obsoleted repeatedly over time. Robot plumbers and robot electricians are a long way off. Robot box-packers? Already here. Hell, robot pizza deliveries aren't a massive leap of the imagination (especially if these automated cars ever come to fruition).

And in a year's time after your obsoletion from a particular job, nobody will remember anyone whining about it, except the whiners. If your grandfather was a gas lamp-lighter, he knew there was no way that was going to last forever, even before electric light came along. And then there was plenty of warning. But to suggest that we shouldn't move on just because someone might fall into poverty along the way? That keeps us all poor - financially and intellectually.

Not my problem, I just want to get to work on time.

The maintenance stuff? Maybe if you closed after the rush-hour evenings (instead of daytime at weekends when MILLIONS of people travel on the Tube), you might get closer to fixing it.

But, to be honest, I'm 35, and the same arguments were being spouted by politicians and unions even before I was born. Fact is, in that time, we've added whole new lines covering vast swathes of London that were never covered before and are now spending billions to connect Birmingham/Manchester by a slightly faster line. The money we've spent pissing about over the last 50 years could have rebuilt the Tube system twice over.

And why are we running trains from the 70's still? Because no fucker will replace them, it's always "cheaper" to just keep patching them and reupholstering them every few years. It's excuses all the way.

And still, my personal "uptime" with the London Underground / Overground is actually closer to 80% than anything else. And that's being generous.

For 20+ years all I've heard is "We're shutting this down / spending this money" in order to make things work better in the long-run and cope with increased demand that we expect. And yet the trains are more crowded than ever, the platforms are too small for the amount of people waiting on them in rush hour, and still we get atrocious amounts of delays and cancellations (and, worse, can't even be bothered to announce such delays/cancellations until about 30 minutes after the train didn't arrive anyway - very useful).

Sorry, the system is old - that means we should know it inside out. It's underground, that means it shouldn't change at all over the years. And yet it gets more expensive every year to have a less reliable system. Remember when "the Circle Line" was actually a circle that you could go all the way around in both directions? Remember when you could change at the large interchanges etc. without having to wait YEARS for them to change an escalator?

That's when you get past the strikes of whatever-group isn't happy earning more than I do for pushing a lever forward or having a computer print a ticket. Which, honestly, add up to WEEKS over the last few years? And at the moment, the Tour de France has brought some stations to a grinding halt already.

There's no point in a mass transit system that isn't transiting people en masse. And that's the one thing we don't actually have happening. If it's that bad, throw it out and start again, and you'll find that - actually - a new system would probably cost you a LOT more than 100-year-old pre-dug tunnels that everyone knows where they are, where they go, and how to get to every one of the entrances.

And the problem is?

What you're suggesting is that we should choose the inefficient methods because it's more expensive but involves unnecessary humans. Quite where the logic of that lies, I can't tell.

If they'd hired some smarty who did the same for their company, and gave 99.9% up-time by their work, surely the same would still happen - except maybe they'd pay that guy a lot as well?

The case for "sabotaging" (look up the origin of the word) technology really died out hundreds of years ago - when we proved that actually it meant that everyone else in the world did better, got cheaper shoes, or - in this case - got to work on time. They've found a way to get the city to work on time, reliably, without the previous reliance on expensive humans to make the wrong (and maybe even politically-motivated in the case of worker's unions) decisions. The city probably makes more money as a result than the transport system COSTS, even if it's not in direct $ figures on some spreadsheet somewhere.

The only consistent, ongoing factor in automation is that it does more, faster, more reliably, cheaper at the expense of staff who did less, slower and less reliably but cost more. Sure, people need jobs - but nobody but the government is obligated to create them.

And, to be honest, if the guy who commissioned and oversaw the system gets a raise as part of that? Good on him. He did a fucking good job by the looks of it.

Anyone want to have these people come do the same to the London Underground so we can sack all the striking drivers that earn more than I do, the useless ticket-office issuers who never know what to do even when the machine TELLS them, and actually get to work on time? I do!

And all the ostensible features of the watch that are worth something beyond geek chick are at the full whimsy of Google. Will they support this five years down the road?

Most people use their smartphones for watches these days, and the rest is usually for glitz or weaponry. Those values-- glitz and weaponry-- aren't dependent on vendor services from a vendor that tosses them away seemingly at will. Not gonna view a map on my wristwatch, so that's out. No phone calls. Movies are impossible. Browsing would be a joke, and a built-in camera would be pretty silly.

Dick Tracy aside, I can see some cultures adopting such a thing, but the prices are huge for such frivolity.

Except they've tried three more times since then, and had either technical problems or had their attempt thwarted at the last moment. It doesn't matter if they also turn their attention to having western-looking jihaddis freshly back from the ISIS Olympics attacking a London shopping mall TOO, they haven't given up on using portable bombs in airplanes to try to knock more out of the sky. Why? Because it plays well for the intended audience, which is NOT the west. It's all about being able to claim, "See? We can still do more such martyrdom operations any time we want, that's how capable we are."

You're right. Our entire culture should only be able to be thoughtful about the safety of any one given situation at a time. People who want to fly RC aircraft should shut up and not worry, at all, about how some idiot is generating bad press and given the uninformed silly people media-hyped things to worry about ... they shouldn't even ADDRESS that issue as long as there is even one angry person anywhere roaming the streets ready to kill over an imagined slight. As a nation, we cannot possibly afford to deal with more than one topic at a time. Speaking of which, how do you have time to scold be when there are people with knives near taxis in your area?

This isn't at all unusual. However, what really gets my goat is how were they allowed to do what they did for four years?

That's four years of some accountant falsifying accounts. Four years of tax not paid or properly checked (if they were earning what they claim, a lot of tax would be due - if they were lying about it, they'd not want to pay that tax). Four years of operating without anyone questioning.

And, most importantly I feel, what's happened to the directors and accountants of the company now ( I highly doubt just one person was in knowledge of this)? My guess is that they've already fled with a nice bundle somewhere.

Happened like mad to the software houses in the 80's, still going on. Why is it compulsory that I have to be sat down like a child when I want to take out a £1000 loan but nobody questions businesses or enforces them to give enhanced accounts or audits in their first few years of operation. It would stop an awful lot of such outright fraud as this if someone from government was poking through their accounts, and they wouldn't even be able to set up a "new" company, transfer the assets and then declare bankruptcy as is also common.

Okay, dial it back. 30 years ago instead of 30 years in the future. 1985.

Sure there are large changes since then, but nothing approaching the kinds of things he's talking about. And AI / machine learning / human-machine interfaces? Not that different. Computers have come on leaps and bounds in speed, size and ubiquity. In base capability? Not so much. The pacemakers, hearing aids, etc. we use now aren't even really any different to those 30 years ago. Better, sure, undoubtedly, but quantum leaps of usefulness? Not really.

If you're going to make crazy predictions, do it for 100 years or more. 30 is just not worth the embarrassment. In the 60's they were saying we were going to have robot servants and flying cars and meal-in-a-pill. That was nonsense even then, but this sounds just as insane And that's nearly TWO lots of 30 years behind us. And all the technology in between that has been hugely drastic and "changed the way we live", hasn't actually changed that much overall - we still work, pay taxes, die of cancer, have starving people in the world, and blow each other to pieces on a regular basis.

And, sorry, but AI hit a stumbling block many years ago. In terms of how it scales, it hasn't changed much in decades. And it won't scale forever, as the computers just aren't scaling at unstoppable rates either (and probably won't for a long time).

The pinnacle of AI that we have is being able to beat a human on a quiz show, and making a robot walk if it can think about it for a few seconds and nothing too drastic happens.

Self-conscious machines? Fuck off. We'll be lucky if we're even closer to making them work things out on their own. At the moment, anything worked out by computer is pretty much a massive human input exercise with massive human verification. We can't even trust them to do simple calculations without checking them. Them "evolving" into some kind of intelligence that we can't even define? Not a chance.

And to be honest, the MOST DANGEROUS machine is one that's dumb and reliable. See this door? You detect it open, you shoot. No matter what. Infinitely more dangerous than some run-away intelligence.

The flight controller is ALWAYS flying the thing. And if you were paying attention (which you weren't), you'd note that I was talking about how the flight controller might handle the presence of debris gumming up a motor and overheating an ESC. It happens all the time - insects, dust, leaves, etc. As I also pointed out, this stuff will seem mysterious to smug people who obviously have no experience with this stuff in the real world.

About half again that much by the time you install gimbal, camera, and VTX for downlink. Regardless, shall we do a test where 1300g hits you in the head at 30+mph? No? Huh.

Many people retrofit with CF props. Regardless, the stock props are plenty capable of taking out an eye, or laying open the meat on your face.

Though you can use the same Google you're talking about to see lovely video of hot, instant fires caused by multirotors hitting the pavement from a long fall/dive and having their onboard LiPo rupture internally. They are very energetic. Just what we need - video of Lithium-fueled fire on someone's July 4 picnic blanket, right where their kid had been sitting in a crowd.

Which explains why the FAA gets a steady stream of phoned-in tips from the public, which they use to issue subpoenas and cease & desist letters threatening fines. Or you could read up on the case of the 17 year old out having a nice time flying FPV in a wide-open public area, up until some lady started to quite literally beat him up for doing so. She gave a shit, enough to commit assault over it. Tip of the iceberg.

Spoken like someone who has never actually built and or operated one.

More likely than a direct hit on the drone by a shell (likely to make the drone drop straight out of the sky, probably in multiple pieces) is the prospect of some debris getting into one or more of the brushless motors. This could cause the motor to overheat, or cause the ESC talking to it to get things wrong. The flight controller can get confused by this, and you could end up with a high battery drain, and the machine doing a nice tilt to one side, with the remaining props spinning way up to try to maintain lift ... presto. From a few hundred feet, the drone could go into a high speed dive at an angle that could very quickly close the distance between the fireworks range (over the water) and the people on the ground. How'd you like 1500g of high-speed hardware coming at your head at, say, 35mph, in the dark, complete with high-speed spinning carbon fiber knives and a flammable LiPo battery onboard.

Beyond all of that, this is about public perception. The complete tool who did this is practically begging to have members of the public pile onto the FAA's existing effort to, in practice, shut down this entire hobby and almost every attempt to put these tools to work in research and business. Gee, thanks.

I'd be suspicious of anything under a year. That doesn't mean I wouldn't hire, but I'd want to hear why you left so fast. Hell, I'd even accept "My last employer was bad and made me do X, Y, Z, and thus I left".

The longest job I ever had - 5 years... and I left because they changed overnight and culled all the decent staff - fulfilled my promises, got screwed over, left the next day. Before that, I don't think there was anything under a year but I was working freelance for a while and there not having a client with under a year of service means you're doing well. They just kept buying me back.

What worries me is not serial job-hoppers, it's people with unexplained gaps. It's also people who stay where they are forever (it's easy to know when you're onto too good a thing and just coast... and I've met plenty of coasters who never want to progress and, when they move on, they only have their way of doing things). Sure, again, if you can explain yourself and you come across as so passionate for that job that's probably the reason you stayed, but anything out of the average range needs an explanation.

For yourself? Always look at jobs. How else do you expect to know what the going rate is, what the growing trends are, where the industry is moving, what your competitors are up to, etc.? And every now and then one of those jobs you're casually browsing will seem so much more your kind of thing, and there's NO harm in just applying and seeing what happens. If and when you get the job, that's the time to weigh things up.

I work in independent schools (I'm not a teacher, I do the IT). Once in, as a teacher, your job is pretty much guaranteed for decades so long as you don't screw up. Would you like to know how many jobsites I pick up in my web filtering logs? People keep on top of what's happening, what the competitor schools are doing, where's not a good place to work (you could tell my old workplace was going downhill by the fact that they advertised for an Assistant Bursar, then another Bursar, then another Bursar three months later, etc.), how much you should be earning, what else is about.

Keep your ear to the ground. It helps if you need to leave. It helps with comparisons should be need to go and ask for pay-rises. It helps with knowing what's out there. And it doesn't take any time at all to do.

But time-limits? You leave when you have a reason to leave, and not before. Someone who leaves EVERY year? That's bound to make me wonder why.