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It's because the naysayers are the ones more actively working in the field and closest to the experimental and theoretical results and are trying to actually accomplish these kinds of tasks.
More actively than Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google in charge of machine intelligence? Very few people in the world are more active in AI-related fields than he is.
They've even invented protocols for sharing information between themselves.
Following the law literally and blindly is not a good idea.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't give a whit about intention - I care about what's actually written. I think most programmers should be familiar with this concept.
The alternative is a completely, utterly unjust world where laws are fluid and impossible to comply with because there's a difference between their wording and their meanings. If the law says "it shall be illegal to do X" and I don't do X, then I should not have broken that law. I can't imagine living in a society that said "well, you didn't technically do X, but we don't like you anyway so it's off to jail".
You must work in the medical industry.
No. I'm just capable of reading and understanding the news.
There were times where employees were basically instructed to use fear tactics to sell TAP, where they would play out scenarios for the customer like "You don't want to open this new monitor and find out there's a dead pixel do you? We can't return it if you don't purchase TAP!"
To which I once replied with a horrified "how much of a piece of crap is this thing if it's that likely to die on the drive home?", then walked out with a stammering salesman chasing me. It's not usually a good idea to convince your customers that your products are disposable junk.
I'm sorry, but you're a fucking moron. There's really no polite way to put it. The flu is traditionally the most lethal contagious disease in world history; more people have been killed by it than pretty much anything else. That's because nasty variants trigger a cytokine storm which is a positive feedback loop where your body kills itself because it thinks something is killing it. Even worse, those storms are most dangerous in people with a strong immune system. That's right: the bad flus kill young, healthy people in much greater proportion than those with weak immune systems.
Go ahead and brag at how tough you are at resisting the flu. While doing so, pray to your god that you never get a bad one and join the ranks of millions who've died of it over the years.
Homeopathy only hurts gullible people.
...and the people they make medical decisions for. I've personally known people who give their kids homeopathic water to treat stuff they really should be seen by a doctor for. It's not the kids' fault that they have stupid parents, but the kids are the ones suffering harm./p
Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there
Like what, exactly? I use Maps all the time to find lunch restaurants and search for addresses. I don't use iBooks extensively because my laptop isn't an ideal leisure reading environment, but it's certainly nice to be able to open manuals I bought on my iPad and want to read at my desk.
There's been no battery life improvement.
Speak for yourself. If nothing else changed at all, I love the "Apps Using Significant Energy" menu item on the battery icon. It's nice to know that some random unexpected app is gnawing on my battery so I can ask their support to please fix it. Judging by the number of app updates I've gotten that contained nothing but power fixes, I'd say it's working.
I'm not going to claim that Mavericks is the perfect OS or that everyone should love it, but it certainly has a lot to commend it.
One which forbids use of the software for weapon systems
As an exercise, write a sentence that bans Lockheed Martin from using your software ("in defense of the country, even if the war takes place in Iraq") while allowing a hacker in Syria to use it in a security system protecting a school for orphans. Weapons aren't inherently good or evil; than can be used to invade or to protect from invaders. How do you draw a line between those in an unambiguous way?
and invading privacy?
What does that even mean? Installing a keystroke logger on my wife's laptop so I can keep tabs on her would sure as hell be a privacy invasion. The police doing the same under warrant to a suspected criminal probably isn't. Again, your challenge is to succinctly describe an algorithm that permits the second while denying the first.
I'll save you the trouble: both are impossible, and no two groups are likely to agree on what is "good" and "evil". I love the FSF but I'll be damned if I want to make them the sole arbiters of what uses I can put GPLed software to.
Your code should be more efficient!