Berlin's Xmas truck was actually stopped by that kind of anti-crash software. It didn't avoid all casualties, but most likely saved many lives. (Article: Berlin truck’s automatic braking system ‘may have saved lives’)

If guns had a reliable mechanism to prevent harm, we could probably carry them on-flight as well.

Bravo! That's exactly what I would have written. Posted messages don't kill. Cars do. Which might be why many cars already have a back door...

> Anthropogenic Climate Change

The real issue shouldn't be how mach man contributed to the change, but how much man can contribute to (slowing down) the change. That looking for a culprit sounds childish.

The cited article, 2016/11/17, gives no further references. The Daily Express citation doesn't even contain the word "1000". The Independent, Tuesday 15 November 2016, cites USA Today as a source....

Google finds a VOA News of April 11, 2013 2:07 PM, mentioning the same 1000 years theory three years ago. The phrase is ascribed to a 2008 ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the NASA. So perhaps it should be 992.

Hawking's original reckoning is missing.

Please mod parent up, if you have points. It is fully agreeable.

Let me add that by setting up tests a society implicitly invites courses. What courses on computing security are available today?

People are going to lose parental authority, driving licenses, and --except US-- firearm licenses, unless they don't prove to be able to manage suitably, or at least acceptably. Tests don't have to be hard, just put people on the right track. Otherwise, they play idiot because that's just what they're left with.

The parenthesized statement doesn't explain why Paypal doesn't allow anonymous payments. By contrast, identifications based on money accounts are among the most reliable, and payment is almost universally accepted as a means of identification. That concept is rooted into assumptions at the very base of human society, along with death and taxes.

Incentivize and reward is the key. Some people can self-motivate themselves, while others need a stronger input. Capitalism (liberism) can even be coercive. Modern communism (China) concedes noticeable leeway to individual initiative. On the other hand, capitalistic countries often embark on long term plans. Capitalism and communism became quite similar to each other.

Both capitalism and communism lean on a monetary system which has proved to be faulty. Consider corruption, unfitness to cooperation of the so-called intellectual property, crowd funding and donation-supported activities even for necessary pursuits. They are all symptoms that the current economic establishment —banks and stock market— is on the ropes. Perhaps technology can bring us better means for incentivizing and rewarding people. That's all we need.

So you have categorized bugs already, well done! That way you can prevent claims based on submissions that you don't consider bugs.
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Of course it's a bug, otherwise it would have been documented!

Zero is the only number which equals its double. Your math must be wrong, because I earned a little bit more than zero since the 1970s. Actually, I only started professional programming in the late 1980s. I'm lucky my dad earned much more by selling fresh food, otherwise I wouldn't have a household right now, let alone an income.

I managed to write some good software, though. I have the feeling that adding up all the software written since the 1970s, it is a heck of a grand job we did. We may still work the same hours and drive the same cars, but computers aren't quite the same.

Possibly, money isn't just the right unit of measurement, especially since it doesn't take free software into account. Alas, we have nothing better for comparing sundry stuff. For comparing software with itself, such as 1990s operating systems vs today's ones, we ought to use evolutionary concepts. Number of individuals, total energy, entropy, anything.

It doesn't look as fabricated stuff, no geek-friendly header fields. Look at this, for example. It seems to be derived from an original pdf, which bears a 2015 date on it. However vulnerable Clinton's server, the documents seem to have leaked from state dept.

I'm not so sure we could have science without politics. For sure, we cannot have science without religion.

Religion does not inhibit logical or deductive thinking. Rather, one inspires another. They band together, unless one falls prey of self-injury. For example, Darwin was renown for his theological merits before becoming famous for reinterpreting the design of Nature.

On the other hand, if we committed scientific research to a team of robots whose minds are so weak that they cannot conceive any moral or religious thought, most probably their outcome would be of no relevance whatsoever. They'd come out with a bunch of meaningless "laws" that nobody could believe or use.

Yes indeed. For example, we're troubling with watt-equivalent measures while phasing out incandescent bulbs. Would it be better had we always used lumen?

Ref [1] has a nice map too, but they don't tell what are those kWh being used for. Since establishing who supplies energy to whom is a political question, (mega)people still has some merits as a unit of measurement.

"Enough for 1.1M people" is a practical unit of measurement. They used to mention joules, but that unit is difficult for readers, especially Americans, who are better used to yards and pounds than meters and kilograms.

Furthermore, "enough for 1.1M people" suggests but does not hold that there are so many customers. One may wonder why Moroccan customers would buy energy from that plant, which implies paying not only production, but also payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits rather than just build their own (see "Spain" below). That really doesn't matter, Sun is open source, and whenever solar energy replaces fossil, bad emissions are reduced —fossil energy entails contempt of dead body.

I see your point. However, constraining redistribution of software may become impractical. Let me explain myself by example. I recall a study on Literary machines before the advent of WWW. It was hypertext, with provisions for per-access micropayment. HTML was much simpler and straightforward, so it won.

What about redistribution of profits? I'm not advocating communism, it has already been tried and failed. I don't have a solution at hand. Yet, it seems to me that software is more important to mankind than the current establishment. Aristocracy passed and nobody regrets. Now we have a different ruling class, based on earning money by selling goods and services. It will pass too. Software won't. How about helping such transition?

I had bought the whole suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and LiveMotion. Hard to learn, hard to upgrade, overly slow because of ubiquitous scripts. Switching to Gimp, Inkscape, Gedit, Tex, and other compatible stuff was such a relief!

Yes, one has to be a bit cuter. That's not the kind of software to spoon feed its users. In return, learning yields the ability to choose one's own food.