Craiggybear

Of course, and then some.

A lot of (very serious) people, I've found.

An AI developed by the military and without oversight would be a very bad thing. A very bad thing indeed.

Ask about the motives. It wouldn't be an Asimov machine for starters

Treading carefully here ... I love DDG and find it yields far more useful results than anything else.

Besides, I like not getting tracked all the time and I can switch off ads without needing any extensions. That in my view is a very civilised set of options and the rest of the Internet should follow by example.

Most mathematicians I know are highly competent programmers and are easily on a par with pro software engineers and often outshine them totally.

Definitely a case of Less Is More. A program should be no bigger than it needs to be. First rule of engineering anything - bridges, dams, roads, software.

Yeah, I do this as well. It is often very useful.

Which is why its a highly specialised field of enquiry. AI has very little to do with CS or programming. Natural Philosophy, formal logic, linguistics and biology are more useful in the long-run.

Personally I liked it because it was something I was engaged with in the 1980's.

troff is for me far harder to read by eye ... TeX and LaTeX are far easier to read and more versatile. Its just a personal thing, I'm sure, but I found taking to TeX an instantly productive thing to do.

Modern TeX/LaTeX packages for distros these days are huge though, in comparison to the stuff that came on a single floppy when I first learned to use it.

The world has gone mad.

You can actually remove traumatic memories using drugs but it has to be done very soon following the traumatic event.

It is in fact an arena of medical ethical conflict between those who advocate it and those who (properly, in my view) don't.

I don't believe a word of this. It isn't proof of any such a process. This to me appears as inappropriate reductionism.

The brain is highly volatile both chemically and physically and is changing minute by minute. The notion that a memory belongs to a single group or cluster of neurons is absurd. They are constantly being reordered and reprioritised and changed throughout the lifetime of the animal. And being lost due to chemical damage and the effects of ageing and free radicals.

The nature of memory and conciousness isn't just the physical existence of neurons. Who you are is more than the sum of the parts.

The mind is also as much a process of the body -- your conciousness and mind grows within it from birth and a large part of who you are is as much a product of that, its hormones and its metabolic chemistry as anything that resides solely between the ears alone.

I'm not assuming anything - you are the one who is assuming.

I made a support or mutt as a more than first class email client.

Simply hook up your RND to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny sub-meson brain, give it a fresh cup of really strong tea and plug it in!

I, too, use mutt. Its my idea of what an email client should be. Text based.

What is wrong with words?

An EEG cannot and does not provide conclusive evidence of brain death. Far from it. It is merely a diagnostic tool to assist a diagnosis -- the actual diagnosis of death is medically and legally dependent upon a physician. There are criteria for establishing death but they are often out of date (drowning and freezing spring to mind) and can be poorly interpreted.

They have also got it wrong before -- times too numerous to mention.

Caution is very necessary here. Its a complicated subject (legally, morally, ethically, scientifically and medically) and questions do need to be asked about organ transplant practice and ethics from time to time.

We haven't even started exploring anything. Not even our own planet.

In universe or galactic terms we simply don't even register.

What you really want is a netbook hackintosh running OS X. All the benefits of a small form-factor -- but its a 'real' computer, can run a compiler and a webserver and doesn't put any artificial obstacles in your way. Program development at the command line, browser (any) with flash and install anything you like. It will sync with your office desktop and its cheap.

Not everyone has the nous or the patience but if you do its a doddle to do and works really well.

You want to hear David Sedaris on this. He was amazed that his visits to the dentist and to hospitals in France where so cheap they didn't even bother to charge him. He had to force them to bill him and it would be for tens not hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Social medicine works in Europe and in Cuba, where I've also seen it first hand. This is why it is so important to preserve the NHS here in the UK.

I agree that involving beginners with OOP is a distraction -- albeit a very important principle. But they must be able to write their own modules, functions and classes first then be comfortable with exporting those then OOP can come naturally from that. Most software is still highly procedural in nature (while it may consume and refer to objects) and even in languages like Python where everything is an object you can still write software that has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Once you have a handle on all that, you can then start utilising the objects and their properties and that is huge fun in Python and Ruby.

I have always loved pysdm -- it is very handy for when you have a separate /home partition and want to remount it as /home on a new or re-installed partition (thus keeping all your files and settings) ... of course you can do it via the command line but this minimises the risk of screwing up badly.

Very interesting, however it makes Firefox 10.0.2 crash if you refresh the page or click off the collusion tab then back on to it. At least it does in Linux.

Will try it out on OS X later ...

"There is the factor that a lot of the code scientists write is hacky, one-off, and fragile"

Oh, absolutely. But the same goes for expensive, commercial software, too. In all walks of life, not just scientific software.

All scientific software should be totally open and transparent -- indeed a lot of it already is. For years, for example, people were erroneously making the mistake of trusting Excel's statistical functions without being aware they were deeply flawed.

Software that is in use for scientific purposes must be open to review and assumptions about their efficacy or correctness should not just be taken for granted. They need to be checked and their outputs verified for correctness.

Even when flaws in commercial proprietary code are found it can take years (or never) before they are corrected. Chances are that if the same flaws show up in OS software they be fixed sooner. Failing that, you can fix 'em yourself -- or at least be in a position to potentially detect them and alert other users.

Many thanks for the link to pandoc. This is incredibly helpful.

I'd not think that at 52 I was anything that could be remotely described as a 'hipster'.

"and the movies are years old."

... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.

Perhaps a better title would be "advertising on TV is broken".

No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable.

I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.

Well, I'd probably agree with that. There are some truly bizarro API implementations.

Hyper anything sounds terribly retro to me, circa 1992.

But I agree: it is an uninformative term for anything which merely establishes a connection and sends/receives data as opposed to specifically delivering content.

REST is just fine as it is. It is a well-understood term for what it does. Why reinvent the wheel and stick a new label on it every five minutes?