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Comment Re:The Dangers of the World (Score 1) 784

I suppose this being US of A a proper investigation would find a number of legal problems and thus make an arrest a reasonable approach to these criminals, if tried hard I am sure one could have arrested them for possession - if they are normal people they would have smoked weed at least once, so they belong to prison. It is a free country after all....

Comment Re:Any experienced teacher already deals with this (Score 1) 388

I am sure there are pupils like you and possibly I was like this too (albeit I doubt that I ever had motivation and ability), yet neither knowledge in particular subject is all, nor claims of knowing more than a teacher are always correctly depicting reality. I am not a teacher but I do teaching at work by virtue of having students assigned to me for a year to do some menial jobs - they should be learning the right stuff mostly programming but more so around programming - because as far as I can tell nothing has changed much since I started - programming is a vital but minor part of developing software(*). I regularly fail to know all details that my newbies know about any chosen programming language yet I beat them every time on the actual programming and developing albeit I have to google more than they do. This will change of course and part of the course is for them to learn as much as possible. The point is - you may know all details but as so often in case of cohders - you fail to see the bigger picture.

* - some things changed since I started though - the division of work changed thanks to progress in communication technology which may make coding (and other things) being done in far away places (or in another office which is just the same if I do not know person doing the job). The system people cut jobs into small pieces and let Turks do the stuff for 10$ an hour. Yet I doubt that any big project can be done effectively only by outsourcing. If a company is a software house delivering software solutions then they most likely need to have in house competence in coding as well as developing, project management, communication and cooperation culture, decision making skills, presentation skills and much more. How often project fail because any of these were not there. Then again it all depends on the project of which part is people doing it.

Comment Re:The 3 Laws of Robotics (Score 1) 258

First of all the current 'intelligent' systems are on a level of an ant or bee. This does not make them less lethal to humans however. The problems are already there then and the biggest is - even systems that are meant to be friendly may become lethal because of oversight, bug, miscalculation, abuse or because they may 'think' that humans are danger to other humans (which is mostly potentially and in quite many cases actually true). What about systems that are meant to kill or at least disable humans? In old good times a gun shot by itself once a year but it did so only if somebody pulled the trigger. Now the autonomous systems may pull the trigger all by themselves and they may have to decide themselves as humans in control loop are too slow. I think in most cases making system robust and reliable may be a shot in the right direction. Alas in the real world scrum team may decide this feature is to be move to next sprint or demo it albeit it is not ready etc... In other words - is anybody ready to pay for robust systems that are less likely to kill by accident? Yea I did not think so. We solve problems that come out of ant like creatures that have enough power to kill many, move on to quality and robustness and then when AI is on horizon we can start thinking about 3 laws and some such things.

Comment Re:Why the overreaction? (Score 1) 166

In most of the cases those commissions are not needed and are a waste of time but we just do not know in advance which plumber's fuckup can be really problematic, so we assume any can be.
Bureaucracy is not a good solution to the problem but it seems the only one that can prevent many accidents. It seems to me that this attitude made nuclear industry surprising safe. At least when one does not think too much about waste disposal.

Comment Re: Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score 1) 166

This is probably one of the few intelligible posts on this thread. I too think that the question is badly formulated and problems are not what we think they are. It is not accidents but waste, it is not energy production but energy production and very important weapons production that stimulated development of fission plants, it is not either nuclear or coal but rather the question of how humanity affects its environment. So far the raise and fall of civilizations followed the path of: develope, shine, destroy environment beyond repair and if move to another place is possible - move and rearrange elsewhere. Problem with this is that we live now everywhere. That is typical of any living organism really - if conditions are good - develop and occupy as much as is possible. Overpopulation causes collapse usually. Sometimes renewal. I hope for the later although I know that usually the former happens.

Comment Re:Give Uber a dictionary (Score 1) 160

People do not really hate Uber or rather most of us had unsettled view of the company and its methods till more and more stories about criminal or almost criminal activities came out. This is topped with all comments on these evil commies 'banning' Uber in say Berlin i.e. on requiring Uber to follow the law as all others do. Stop throwing verbal abuse at opponents and use arguments of reason instead, then maybe the 'hate' will become reasonable doubts about revealed business practices. But I guess that is too much to ask, is it not?

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