The modding of this comment is ridiculous. You may not like the conclusion but this is how we should hope people engage on a community forum. You know, by explaining themselves in detail. Obviously it's debatable, but 100% unassailability should not be the threshold for being modded up or down.

I think endless copyright and the advent of more server-side applications are somewhat related but mostly different things.

Also, I suspect (hope? dream?) the days of extending copyright indefinitely are over. One of the big excuses with the Bono act was that it put us in line with the rest of the world (read: Europe), I don't think there have been any extensions to Copyright beyond the status quo globally to support that. I also think the 98 fight woke a lot of people up to this racket and there will be major push back.

We live in an age where the ability to create new works is more democratic than ever and my guess is people will be more enthused about leveraging that to reimagine and elaborate on older works than ever. I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with The Great Gatsby and The Trial.

Having said all of that, maybe I am naive. I certainly expect Big IP to put forward some nonsense nakedly self-serving argument to extend again but I think a lot of the consolidation we've seen on media production side indicates they know the jig is probably up.

Maybe I am misreading you, but to act like there is no difference between Feudalism and Capitalism is a stretch that even Karl Marx would call you out on.

How exactly? I hear this a lot but I don't see much empirical to support this claim. I ask as a "black" person from the US.

Have you looked much into Google's Nashville lawsuit (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-finalize-court-victory-over-nashville-and-google-fiber/)? From what I recall the monopoly is more implicit due to intense bureaucracy around attaching wires to poles. Whatever you want to call it, rents are being sought and granted.

At no point did I say iOS was "clean and easy." I said it's possible with C#. Having said that, I use Xamarin a lot and their AOT compilation technique - while a little unwieldy if you're not on a Mac - works surprisingly well.

If Xamarin can do what they've done with C#/.NET then obviously it's POSSIBLE to do this in Java, but I haven't seen any actual implementation. This is why I said "right now." Or maybe I've missed the Java project that allows you to share 90% of your code between iOS, Android, and Windows.

If by "back end" you mean server side infrastructure you are correct, but only because Xamarin doesn't have to pay much attention to the back end. .NET has an entire stack devoted to such matters and Microsoft foots the bill on maintaining it. Xamarin just focuses on the "last mile" if you will.

You're right, it is mostly lambdas and extensions. After all these years my head has conflated the concepts as they all came around the same time.

"99.5% of the code I encounter doesn't use above Java 1.4 or .Net 2.0, so all the nifty language features are pretty much theoretical sizzle on roughly the same steak. And even so, the nifty features often have negative value because they while save the programmer 2-3% of his or her time, the maintainers often end up breaking things because they're not all that familiar with the new hotness in language features."

Obviously I can't tell you what you've seen but, in comparison, I see LINQ (.NET 3.0 I think) everywhere. Async/await is pretty popular too but it is newer and isn't as universally usable so it is not as common as LINQ.

It depends on your situation but, right now, C# is the only language that you can use to write programs for Windows Desktop (including Win32/.NET/Modern), Web, Mac Desktop, Android, and iOS.

And with all of the OWIN stuff you'll be able to run pristine .NET apps on OS X and Linux.

And you'll be able to host all of this code in one source-controlled Visual Studio project.

It may not be a reason to switch a shop entirely, but there is definitely a unique value-proposition.

So I live in Downtown Atlanta Ga which is far from suburban. There are plenty of taxi stands around but I prefer to use Uber. Why? Because almost invariably the taxis do not operate "within the law as the state, the counties, and the cities require."

When I walk up to a cab they ask me where I'm going, and if I'm not going very far they almost always refuse to give me a ride. Many also don't turn on their fare meters and make up rates (I've lived Downtown for 16 years, I know what a ride is supposed to cost). My understanding is that both of these actions are in violation of the ordinances that govern the operation of Taxis in the city.

Could I report these people or challenge their bogus practices? Sure. But instead I just take Uber where these issues don't exist and I ALWAYS get excellent customer service - whether in a Town Car or a Hyundai.

The situation in other cities might be different, but here, the cab drivers have dug their own graves.

A greater intelligence may prefer internally inconsistent rules and use complex heuristics to choose between them. To us, the results of that process may seem so unfathomably complex that it looks random.

I enjoyed this story which is related: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/g/mcnrsts.html

I hope you are right. On the other hand, they may decide that we will live and die by the rules that we created in some sort of ethical calculus involving self-determination.

Bravo!

But the AI's will be able to move. They'll be able to move very quickly, indeed.

The robots might be cheaper today. Especially if it is just a webcam, microphone, motorized wheels, battery and the cheapest wireless networking computer being operated by a server in a more secure area of the store.

I imagine a single guard monitoring feeds from ten of these roaming around a wal-mart. The guard doesn't even have to be in the wal-mart. Throw a blanket over it and the guard knows something is wrong and calls physical security.

Throw in some advanced mapping that can compare expected camera images to actual images and use the human to examine positive signals and dismiss the false positives. You might be able to up that human monitor to monitor 100 to 1000 units depending on the false positive rate and the rate of actual incidents.

99% of the time, nothing is happening during security guard duty.

OMG. I didn't realize it wasn't K9 until you pointed it out.

I'm happy that a few versions from now it might be vaguely dog shaped.

And maybe it will have a helpful Death Ray in its nose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HgejSCHRi8