Why -exactly- are we hearing this? Because some "senior full-stack engineer" recently published a "lively 6,000-word essay"? And ignore every single paper published in software engineering during the past 20+ years?

OOP requires extra discipline and much, MUCH more skill to do it right, because implementation is much more entangled to design. Ask anyone working with Agile or similar stuff. OOP requires more code, sometimes as superficial as gettes/setters, and in return it creates truly self-contained units of functionality, upon which you can create other complex things like event-driven programming - unless someone has the audacity to say that interrupts and cpu "signals" (as in C) is more productive and safe.

The problem with Java and C# and of course JavaScript is that OOP has become a wrapper to ever-growing sets upon sets of APIs that no one really knows all of them 100%. But without OOP we would have to invent another way to handle tens of millions of lines of code within a single project without basic tools like proper exception handling, inheritance, "virtual" and "generic" functionality, operator overloading, etc, etc.

This has got to be the most ridiculous post I've seen in slashdot this year. The guy wants to "get paid to explain" why a theoretically proven algorithm is difficult to implement safely and thus it is worthless. I guess he can also explain how he also writes his own Linux kernel and applications, because he's far better coder than a few hundred of thousands of crowdsourcing coders and decades of peer-reviewed community software.

Anyone with proper Win7/Win8.x license will probably be able to sue M$ for this. Since their technical support is still active and the hardware at setup time was accepted as compatible, this is a violation of EULA. It is like buying a car and then the company suddenly changes the left-side steering wheel with a right-side one, mandatory to keep its service active. Typical M$. Switch to Linux now.

Great. Can now Nestle do the same with cocoa, so that children in Africa do not have to work 16 hours daily for $2 in order for the company to make the chocolate? Google's AI promos are plain stupid, but this is gross. This science-for-marketing thing has gone too far.

The petition has already been proven a joke. It was hijacked by bots all over the globe. I am surprised that the UK gov actually made a statement about this. Well, maybe not surprised at all...

Simple math:

Earth circumference is about 40075 km associated with 360 degrees of angle (lat,lon). This means at most 111.32 km per degree, i.e., less than 31 m per angular sec. If we use GPS coords and two typical 'float' (32-bit) with epsilon accuracy at least 10e-5 we can have 5-digit decimals or roughly 1.2 m resolution, which is far smaller than the 5-8 m maximum resolution of commercial GPS.

So, with just 8 bytes we can have more than enough location registration anywhere on the Earth with the maximum available technology today. Unless these guys have found a way to pack 3 readable words in just 8 chars with no collisions whatsoever, they deserve the next Turing award - or the "bubble of the year" award in any other case.

The local Afghan governor said yesterday that "sadly, they had to to di", because Talibans were passing through, getting treatment from MSF and borrowing (temporary stealing) the cars. Also, there is no other airforce in the area and no other hospital in that region, located ***between*** two Taliban positions (see map).

It was a clear-cut tactical decision to destroy the hospital and they kept on bombing it for almost a full hour until the central building was leveled to the ground. The MSF central has already announced that they are pulling out of Kunduz completely, which was in fact the real goal behind the bombing. If they go back there, they will be bombed again, and again, and again...

The author has already given full-access licence with the latest version of the software, non-revokable, back in 2011. If an update is scheduled, only THEN he can alter the distribution and usage selectively.

Furthermore, there is no legal way to back this up, since the international trieaties forbid any customer discrimination based on race, religion, political views, etc. This means that someone WILL use his software and if he decides to prosecute him/her, the court will drop the charges.

In practice, there are several thousands of scientist in other countries that will be willing to help. Send them your scripts and they will run them for you. No one can bring racism into science. Period.

Seriously, this is perhaps the most ridiculous "study" ever from OECD. It is nothing less than blaming the use of pens instead of pencils for bad exam grades.

Someone should eventually get in the media and apologize for this as a hoax. And do it fast.

1. Yes, the brain is massively parallel and "analog" - BUT not every neuron forms a distinct cognitive function (FBNs) and neuron do fire in pulses/spikes (almost binary) rather than continuous (analog) outputs.

2. No, the article does NOT identify 'cpu cores' in the brain. It uses this metaphor (stated clearly in the paper as such) to point out the level of parallelism needed to run anything remotely similar to the complete functional 'package' in the brain.

3. The resolution of modern fMRI is at 3mm^3 (30K-50K active voxels) but this has to do more with the localization of the activations and less with the inherent complexity (dimensionality) of the spanned data space. In other words, in this work e.g. the visual center is detected as activated or not, regardless of how fine the resolution is.

4. The fMRI captures the complete 3-D brain volume, hence the detected activations include all the "always on" circuitry like respiration, cardiac rhythm, etc. Cognitive processes are only a few of these activations and are identified by experts when looking at the actual activation maps.

5. The methodology is completely data-driven and it includes two very popular non-parametric approaches: one is ICA for blind-source separation (measuring how many components are needed to describe the data) and the other is dataset fractal analysis (estimating the intrinsic dimensionality of any dataset). In both cases, the maximum number for such a plain visuo-motor task seems to be around 50.

6. The number 50 is only indicative, as it is measured for specific fMRI visuo-motor experiments. In intense cognitive situations, e.g. a pilot trying to land a plane on an aircraft carrier at night with bad weather, this is probably much higher - but in he same order of magnitude. On the other hand, when very small activations are ruled out (pre-processing by voxel smoothing), this number becomes much lower.

7. Currently, we have no idea how to develop a fully functional "brain" just by putting together 10 or 50 or even 1000 parallel processes. The simple idea of the data-driven approach is to point out that we should focus on independent -neural networks- rather than -single neurons- when trying to simulate an actual brain.

8. The current state-of-the-art neuromorphic chip by IBM provides just about 1/3 of a single voxel with 1/40 of neuron synapses within, so it is imparative to see how we can use these resources the best we can.

I hope these hints make things a bit clearer now :-)