You're leaving out the force multiplier that is modern technology. It's what Einstein said- the bomb has changed everything but our thinking.

If Hitler had had the bomb, the world would have been destroyed via nuclear winter before they could have figured out what was happening . It's just an accident of history- not a form of historical inevitability- that Hitler didn't get the bomb first and starting using it.

You're making the same mistake in thinking that people who cite the improbability of life itself as evidence of divine creation. The fact is, if we weren't here - by accident- then we wouldn't be talking about why we're here. Being here- for whatever reason including just chance- is a prerequisite to talking about why we're here.

So also with our lucky continued existence under the influence of Bronze Age ideas of God and Heaven and Hell and the supremacy of Biblical and Islamic or Hebrew law which is, how many people in the world live and evaluate morality still to this day, especially in America where half of all people reject evolution in favor of creationism and vote that way. If we had gotten unlucky in, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Being here to talk about itself proves nothing about the current efficacy of those ideas.

So today we are facing a timebomb called global warming. It's going to go off, it IS going off and once it reaches past a certain point - a point which may be as close as 20 years hence, then there will be no turning it back, no magic technology is going to save us. 20 years is not enough time to change a conservative's "mind". We need to have started acting in a concerted manner yesterday. So this is how the conservative mind represents a clear and present danger not just to the US but to everyone in the world. It's the intersection of the rapid pace of change and the magnitude of change that technology confers on us and conservatism being conservatism.

Another way conservatism threatens humanity is the threat of conservatives in other nations getting a hold of something more deadly and far reaching than just airplanes. As nanotechnology progresses, as home fabrication becomes a reality, as our command over nature increases on the genetic level and microscopic level, as higher education spreads it increases the probability that well integrated, seemingly intelligent fundamentalists will appear in labs, in positions of power in research institutions and next time it won't be pressure cookers at marathons but germ warfare everywhere or worse.

None of this is taking into account the heedless, reckless actions of non-terrorists within our society who are motivated by pure greed and hubris who may accidentally release a pathogen or a genetically mutated organism which kills hundreds of millions before we can even understand what's happening. Or something more pervasive like the destruction of the ozone layer, which has the power to wipe out the bottom of the food web through over exposure to UV. In fact, that almost happened.

The conservative / insanely greedy and selfish mind and modern society are fundamentally incompatible. We cannot continue to permit the greedy and the religious head cases loaded down with sociopathic indifference to others to continue to exist on this earth. Full stop. Those are genetically mediate traits and it's at the level of genetics where ;we need to acquire knowledge in order to eliminate them.

Exactly. Altermeyer shows that authoritarians, which in the UIS are conservatives, literally do not process information like other people. They reliably take longer to recognize ambiguous stimuli , they can reliably be counted on to not live according to the dictates of reason. When put in charge of an army in a game of conflict / negotiation, they implement policies that lead to a nuclear holocaust.

If you want to read a book by a research psychologist whose studies and conclusions which will change your mind about your fellow human is capable of and what they will do if given the chance,, then read The Authoritarians- it's a life changing event.

I should say that Altermeyer does not assert that conservatism is genetic in its genesis.. That's coming form ethnobioology and sociobiology.

Sorry but you're talking to a hard core evolutionary psychologist so i agree, evolution does make people selfish and therefore we have no reason to wonder *why* conservatives are selfish. But like any other normally distributed trait, some some people are MORE selfish than others, and some people are so selfish that their innate impulses are maladaptive, given their environment.

Thus, we agree, the selfish conservatives are a genetic phenomena.

The fact is that conservatives cannot cope with the rate of change that technology is delivering. Just like they cannot cope with equality for women.. Or equality for the races. Or economic equality. Or any other egalitarian notion.

But the world cannot survive by oppressing most of the people for the benefit of the few. Society can't survive by appealing to Bronze Age notions of reality and morality.

Once a long long time ago it was adaptive to bash your neighbor's brains out, take his stuff, enslave your enemies and live to gain power in a power hierarchy, all the while controlling others by appealing to a Sky God and indeed believing in that Sky God yourself. That kept things going, if only miserably but it kept societies together, which was better than being conquered or eaten .

Those times are gone.

Now conservatives are completely maladaptive in their appeal to ancient Sky Gods and their endless appetite to advance themselves and their genetically mediated indifference to the suffering of people not in their tribe or, in the case of global warming, their generation.

No you fucking moron,t he parts that deal with stopping climate change are NOTHING but anti-science and anti-reality. The only political bias here is in your fucking head, you know, where you've convinced yourself that AGW is still not settled.

It has to become the defacto mission of all science to find the conservative gene(s) and prevent their future expression in humans. All scientists have to consider that THIS is their most pressing goal. The problems we face, the serious ones like global warming, religious extremism or the so called "clash of civilizations", gigantic disparities in wealth distribution and the follow on problems of crime, war and civil unrest ,aren't fundamentally problems with technology or the lack of basic science needed to address the issues. They're the result of the actions of conservatives, of non-egalitarian greedheads and religious fanatics all of whom are the conservatives within their respective societies. Conservatism isn't a "point of view". It's a disease. It's a sickness that causes your ability to reason, to impartially process evidence, to effectively short circuit if such evidence would otherwise lead you to change one of your beliefs. And about those beliefs. Anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, authoritarian, unempathetic to the point of sociopathy and concerned only with immediate and personal gratification. It's what John Kenneth Galbraith said : "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." looking back it's never been any different. They go after science, historically via religion but lately they've dropped that facade and admit it's just for money, for centuries. Centuries. In the West they opposed *every* *single* *advancement* in civil society, equality and anything tending towards egalitarian outcomes for centuries and int he East, they stil do that. They fly buildings into planes, try to get a hold of nuclear weapons for the purpose of wage war on civilians populations, in India and Pakistan they set fire to and behead their opponents, in America they bomb buildings , shoot doctors, lie about climate change, decimate the environment for all future generations and rape the economy . When is enough enough? When will scientists finally admit that we don't have technological problems, we have problems with the behavior and proclivities and thinking of conservatives and begin to look at it like the engineering problem it is. The conservative gene is a dangerous anachronism which, if left unaddressed will extinguish civilization through one means or another.

One imagines that such information is securely encrypted within the database.. no?

This is why we decided not to integrate with any Google services or software. They throw shit over the wall and abandon it. They have a working service and change everything about it. They do this all the time. In fact, ditching XMPP after ten years represents a new dimension along which you can't trust them. Not only can't you trust the new shit to be around longer than 18 months, but now you can't trust anything under, apparently, 10 years stay around either.

Yeah. Integrate with Google's offerings.. I think not.

This has a funny smell to it. Everyone knows all of America's IT companies use a variety of techniques (double dutch etc.) to avoid being good corporate citizens of the US. So why is Apple being singled out.

one theory goes Apple would not play ball with the Feds in some security relate way- think CALLEA. The game is, all tech companies cheat massively on their taxes and in exchange for those ill gotten billions, Uncle Sam expects them to step up to the plate when the Feds come knocking for back doors etc . Any company who doesn't play ball gets paraded before Congress and the American public and threatened with having their criminal tax dodge taken away.

Google is as guilty as Apple. So it IBM HP Oracle and every single other IT company. So why is Apple having it's drawers dropped over a barrel like this?

if he doesn't want to be sued for making false statements regarding his company's outlook, since Infosys is a public company and no one, including Infosys is going to do for IT what manufacturing did for the assembly line.

Programs (robots ) can't write bespoke programs or even troubleshoot existing ones better than say LINT and realistically are as far away from that goal as human-level general cognition type AI has always been, which is to say a it's still a mere pipe dream.

It's not like there aren't teams who periodically assemble with some new way of automatically composing programs from, say, existing components, or from VERY descriptive descriptions - little languages- of the program to be written or within some VERY VERY limited domain. In fact, there is always a new run at this being made somewhere and while it's sucked up more than it's fair share of VC fumes , it's never delivered on jack squat.

So if this jackofff is thinking he's making a credible threat to Congress in response to being told he can't dump (crappy, underpaid ) labor on the UIS market, then please, Congress, rest assured this is the very emptiest of all empty threats.

If this slumdog-millionaire style greasy-haired dirtbag is thinking he's making a forward looking statement to investors then he's going to want to avoid a possible shareholder lawsuit by accurately qualify his statement with just how many decades- and that would be no less than ten- before anything like "IT robots" amount to more than

"...push or say 'one'... "

 

I think the post is believable and certainly comports with what I've seen,. Abusive, assholes in power positions ruin projects all the time. I don't think to screen swipe my exchanges with assholes because I don't feel the need to *prove* anything to someone else. People take me at my word and my word is good. You're trying to issue some requirement on everyone else for believability. Pics or it didn't happen is OK for nuclear arms verification treaties. People sharing their personal experiences in an online forum? Uh,... no./

Thinking on unit testing is dominated by a small group of gurus who have been effective at establishing a few articles of faith on the topic and most programmers reflexively agree with those opinions in order to make a public demonstration that they *understand* unit testing and can be taken seriously. Article of Faith #1 - don't write unit tests for private methods. It's ridiculous and wrongheaded to never test private methods. There is nothing about a private method that makes it any less complex, any less prone to error or any less worthy of being tested than the public API. It's not hard to see that SOME private methods will only be invoked in rare circumstances which you won't easily think to test for when viewing the program from the POV of /the public API . This is even more true if private methods call private methods. Five deep, throw in some case logic in each and you've got a combinatorial explosion of test cases at the API level one of which recommend themselves naturally. Sure, in theory it can be done, but in theory, you need not make mistakes in the first place and have no need for unit testing. Article of Faith #2: Another thing that makes unit testing an exercise in checkbox punching is the idea that you should never write a line of code before the unit test is written. The person who came up with this idea does not program things which are not already clear cut. I know my methods will be refactored, I know my classes will come and go. i know what I think is my driving use case will change utterly as I iterative discover what REALLY needs to be done. Writing millions of unit test cases that will ultimately be thrown away is a literal waste of time. There's more but it's enough. Unit tests are often useless because it's just an exercise in confirming your expected input, not *really* thinking about how things can go wrong.

Because economics which says wages rise when there is s shortage of labor and falls when their is a surplus is for the Little People ; when you're a multi-national, Special Reverse Economics are applied.

Yeah you fucking moron, not all papers in the fucking discipline of climatology are examining whether AGW is real. A lot of them are just doing the basic science in their field which is where the evidence that AGW is real. In fact, a lot of papers specfically set their research goals to prove or disprove some hypothesis directly related to AGW without actually saying IN THAT VERY PAPER that AGW is real. AGW is real the way evolution is real. All the papers that deal with some aspect of evolution don't come out and say "evolution is real!" because they're not writing for the army of fucktards who think it's not.

You're a fucking moron. The whole point of the article is that the people doing the scientific work in the area all have come to the same conclusion because of the evidence uncovered by them in the course of doing science. For the illiterate anti-scientific fucktard product of cousins on Slashdot , the scientific method == reality. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you just don't know that doing science is as close as humans will ever come to making a truth machine which takes in data and spits on truth, reality. Science is not a popularity poll and surveying the opinions of scientists on the reality of a hypothesis within their domain of expertise is not the same as asking conservatives from South Carolina if we should reinstitute slavery.

Your point is misguided since the evidence and data you suggest we should use (instead of, what percentage of scientists believe in AGW) is EXACTLY what those 97% of scientists in this meta study have done their entire professional careers. That's where that 97% statistic comes from - from the people who did the research, ran the numbers developed the evidence which others failed to refute.

Incredible and somewhat depressing that you could read this story, miss the main and virtually only point of it, and still get a 5 star comment on slashdot.