What if we just manufacutred criminals by making it illegal to tamper with a URL bar's contens, and then taught every kid to code!

"Genius! This thing prints money!"

-- Reform the fucking CFAA. Every kid has a million times more accessibility to coding and information than when I taught myself at age 8. If you're not coding it's either because you don't want to, or your parents are fucking daft.

I'm tired of everyone being too dumb to even try.

And this should affect regulations... why?

Operating the doors in a safe manner. (hard)

How so? You don't even need a computer. Just make it so the train doesn't move if the doors aren't closed, the doors move with little force, and if they fail to close they re-open and try again in 5 seconds.

... and probably a thousand other tasks that is done by a human. Reacting to fault conditions for instance (very hard)

If anything is outside its normal parameters, hit the brakes, cut the power, and send an alarm.

Human drivers can't really do much else, either.

Perhaps the problem of speech recognition is that we try to teach computers our language.

AFAIK the problem of speech recognition is that a human can use the context to guesstimate what a garbled message might have meant, but a computer can't since it doesn't have a model about the subject. It would take a fully sapient computer to reach human-level speech recognition.

If one really enjoys the work one will not treat the work as _work_, but rather something that is FUN - - EXCITING - - REJUVENATING

But it's not. An exhausting activity doesn't become any less exhausting just because you enjoy it. You need downtime for maintenance, no matter how much you might not want it.

I have been in the tech field for decades and I keep seeing people who take the task they are assigned with as challenges that they want to overcome getting the job done faster, with more zeal, and produce much better code than those who take whatever they are being tasked with as "burden"

From office politics to micromanagement to inane performance metrics to managers who make it perfectly clear that they see themselves as feudal lords running their little fiefdoms for the enlargement of their egos and couldn't care less about efficiency, a modern workplace is set up precisely in such a way as to discourage professional pride and encourage cynical resignation. That's not particularly surprising, since the people who designed it had no better models of organization to draw from than said feudal fiefdoms, which were not set up for efficiency but for suppressing peasants by crushing their spirits.

Some people can shrug off the lingering stink of dung ages and excel, some can't. But something is very wrong when it takes an exceptional person just to not view your primary means of accomplishing something as soul-crushing drudgery. Most jobs aren't inherently that bad, and most people aren't really content to merely consume. Even places like 4chan spin around creativity, crude as it might be. So why does the average peon dream of winning it big and forever escaping the need to work for a living?

Hierarchy has been the primary source of inefficiency everywhere I've ever worked. But how to design an organization that can coordinate itself without hierarchy, especially given that it's made of humans used to playing games of master and servant rather than cooperating for common goals? Now that is the trillion-dollar question.

Is this where we set the bar of government interference in our private lives?

Commerce is not your "private life". It is the transfer of "property", something created by government fiat and enforced by government guns. And it in most cases is it the transfer of "property" to or from a corporation, an entity created by government fiat.

If it doesn't directly involve government issued land and resource deeds (the root of all physical property), copyright and patents and trademarks (the root of all so-called "intellectual property"), or corporate charters, and doesn't involve government-enforced contracts, then you can maybe complain about government interference in your "private life".

Pretty much all the power needed for a transaction is going to be the mining (a transaction isn't valid unless a miner has entered it into a block).

That is incorrect. The validity of a transaction depends only on how it relates to the transactions that precede it. Mining simply keeps track of the "official" history of transactions, to guard against double-spend attacks.

So we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation; if we assume:

And that's another problem: the energy used for mining depends on the hashrate, not transaction rate. It's true that increasing popularity of Bitcoin rises both, but trying to calculate "energy per transaction" on that basis is pretty much the same as trying to calculate "drowned people per litre of ice cream consumed" on the basis that warm weather increases both.

no secrecy? - check

You can easily have secrecy in a vote by mail scene by using two envelopes. The outer one contains both your proof of ID and the inner envelope, and the inner envelope contains your vote and no markings. The whole package arrives at the election office, the outer envelope is opened, your ID is checked against a list, and the inner envelope is put to the ballot box unopened. Once all votes have been cast, the ballot box is shuffled, the now anonymous inner envelopes are opened and the votes counted.

I didn't know cold_fjord has kin in Russia. Small world, eh?

The Bitcoin network uses about $35 worth of energy to process a single transaction.

This seems extremely unlikely, since processing a transaction means transmitting a few hundred bytes and doing doing some simple cryptography and database lookups.

Now, I don't know how much energy a single credit card transaction uses, but given the transaction fees that processing companies charge, I'm willing to bet that it's far, far less than $35 worth.

Yet for some reason you think this logic doesn't apply to Bitcoin transactions.

7000 people will die of the influenza in Liberia this year. That's nearly ten times the number of people that have died from Ebola.

Which is why things like Swine Flu get worldwide attention.

I know you've seen a lot of scary made-for-TV movies and what-not,

An argument from condescension? How very logical of you.

but despite that, there is no disease that can penetrate a hazmat suit.

That depends on the specifics of the hazmat suit in question, of course. Even airtight with its own supply isn't necessarily good enough since you might be contaminated when taking it off. And most are far from airtight, since that basically cripples you - apart from the bulk, you can't sweat.

Period.

Spelling out "Period" simply signals your argument didn't sound convincing on its own, even to you.

If my wife contracted this, I'd put on the suit and go right in and give her a hug. There would be absolutely no risk to me. None, zero, nadda.

Well then, the medical professional talked about in this article must have been a fool then, and treated his patients without this foolproof hazmat suit of yours.

Chomsky explained everything you need to know in the 70's. Educate yourself, idiots.

Here's news for you mate. There is no shortage of skilled workers. There is only capitalistic elites applying very strict selection requirements via flavor of the month bullshit requirements (ignoring that coders learn new languages without having to get a degree or cert). This is done so they can pretend to be looking for workers, when in fact they are trying NOT to hire anyone so they can meet the government's requirements and employ more lower paid H1B visa workers. There are actually HR seminars about how NOT to hire people while still complying with the requirements of looking for work. "Oh my, you don't have a Certificate or Degree in $LANG, I'm afraid that's a requirement. Yes, you may say you know it, but how do I know that?" In fact, they just filter all applicants by their strict filter and you don't even get interviewed. They have to interview a few folks, just to seem legit, but that's the nature of this beast.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

I reached that point in the 90's.

Now I write all my code in a meta language that compiles down into COBOL, C, C++, C#, Erlang, FORTH, Fortran, Google's Go, Haskel, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and more.

It takes about two weeks for me to learn a new language and write the "runtime" for my meta compiler. Then I can deploy all of my existing solutions on the new platform faster than the other guys can get "Hello DB Connection" out the door.

Fuck all the shitty languages and "new" platforms. Now that you've actually grown up and stopped being a fucking fanboy, go write your own meta compiler. I'll open source mine when I retire, it's what gives me the edge over all the noobs still wasting time reimplementing their wheels.