... by hiding the source code, hides both its dependency on open source and on other less reputable sources.

Both the most likely to be effective and the least likely to happen.

Perhaps I have less faith in people's ability to achieve long-term goals at the cost of a short-term inconvenience than I should.

For me, the point at which the documentary became unwatchable was at the filler, 40-year old TV doco footage of Jacques Cousteau. It's in a sub, it's undersea, but it felt lazy; I'd prefer to keep my memory of the iconic Jacques on TV a good one.

Could it be that a photon that carries no information is, in fact, nothing at all.

It's all arbitrary anyways so why the hell not.

Their business is to supply power to you. You are going to pay. You will pay for the power, the poles, and the really big number that will arrive as you pay to bail them out from an unreasonable business situation and unrealistic legislative requirements that lock-in and amplifies the problem - but not with the people who create it.

As you are busy blaming them, are you happy to pay twice over for power?
Are your legislators doing a good job for you?

Their salaries are no doubt still being paid because the impact of a loss of supply would bankrupt every business. Their culture is defined in no small part by the inflexibility of some of the technical limitations - so don't expect effective change while the actual issues are being denied.

Standard issue with electrical reticulation is that the general public are so uninformed as to be living in a land of comic book physics.

The industry is full of really responsible people invested in their business going well and delivering a service. The OP beautifully points out how a couple of inflexible limits: a requirement to provide power into dangerous places - uneconomically, liability through perverse legislation and the impact of climate change has come around to ... severely bite the legislators in the ass, and the voting public and consumers.

While it may be fun to win over in some legal match its a zero sum game and hugely wasteful.

From http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Lifecycle emissions (gCO2eq/kWh)
Nuclear, 12
Coal, 820

Also worth considering the volume. Nuclear waste volume is much lower per tonne than for coal.

Too easy to define BS as being the exact equivalent to hype.

The code of conduct doesn't just land from Mars. It's the result of various people in the team agitating for change. The CoC might well be being promoted to give people who have a political agenda, not a coding agenda, the opportunity to gain more control.

Software rewards a high degree of discipline, a coherent technical approach. It's sometimes necessary to prune code contributions that are rubbish in spite of the fact that this might hurt someone's feelings of self-worth. When this happens its easier to blame another's bias than your own incompetence.

It would be interesting to know the level of code contribution, and its quality, from the promoters of the CoC.

Old, basic and obviously forgotten.

Good chance that having had the skillz not to back up for three months he'll have rolled out the old defrag option first so that recovery is as smooth as silk.

Admittedly a radio show (which I am loosely calling a documentary) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

The ones I particularly liked were Vilayanur S. Ramachandran: The Emerging Mind: 2003 and Trust and Transparency - Onora O'Neill: A Question of Trust: 2002.

I found it good interesting listening while driving.

Unless you have a production environment with a software product that breaks with Windows update turned on. In which case you have to take additional security and maintenance measures and have a team that is tasked with (and funded properly) to do testing and updates on a regular basis.

I'm not sure whether it is discomfort at the idea of having a computer call them silly, a deep belief that humanity is somehow special in a special way (carefully defined in undefinable terms) or just a deep and enduring lack of imagination. Between AlphaGo beating Lee Sodel, the cancer treatments being proposed by Watson and the rise of driver-less cars we are seeing many supposedly impossible roles being taken over by software.

The five assumptions noted basically are basically denial ... reinforced with more denial. The evidence in a number of areas is in. Computers and software routinely appear in locations doing things predicted to be impossible. Computing capability keeps exceeding predictions.

Arguably the one valid assumption made is that intelligence is computable. If it is, the Church-Turing thesis gives the useful theoretical result that anything computable can be run on a UTM. It seems likely that what will end up happening is that the deniers keep arguing the point on what 'intelligence' is even after the AI they deny being possible has become bored with the discussion and moved on to more interesting pastimes.