I guess some things never change:

Well, my computer makes my dog look like Albert Einstein. I plugged it in and turned it on, and instead of going to work on my telephone-company letters, it started asking a lot of idiot questions, such as what day it was. So I typed in the following computer program:

NEVER YOU MIND WHAT DAY IT IS. WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO IS STRAIGHTEN OUT ALL MY FILES AND COME UP WITH A NICE HEALTHY LIST OF MY TAX DEDUCTIONS, TAKING PAINS TO GIVE ME, RATHER THAN THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, BUT NOT CLAIMING ANYTHING THAT WOULD LAND ME IN THE SLAMMER, IF YOU GET MY DRIFT.

And the computer said:

SYNTAX ERROR

Do you believe that? This machine that doesn't even know what day it is tells me, the paid professional writer, that I have a syntax error.

Coding is about a way of thinking... not about a particular language. Pick one that lets you get started quickly and doesn't require you to understand objects etc just to do your first simple program. This is why BASIC was great... it got kids going quickly and gave them a nice simple slope into more complex subjects and ambitious stuff:

10 print "hello"
20 goto 10

Also, ignore 99.9% of the stuff you get as advice. I remember back in the mid-2000s... I read some Gentoo Linux nuts advising people wanting to get off Windows that Gentoo was the right choice - definitely. It will compile up from source... and it only takes about 15 hours to install - and oh, BTW, you should make sure you set CFLAGS to "-march=x86_zzxxxy_intel -O9999".

Shut up zealots.

is accessible literally to every single person on Earth.

It's trivial. Even actors can learn it.

I'm probably going to get shot down over this and get -1 as troll, but IMAO you cannot make a great programmer unless you've taken some college courses specifically related to computer science. That is in addition to having a passion for problem solving and tinkering with anything and everything. This comes from mostly anecdotal instances of people I have ran into in my over 30 years as a computer programmer.

Taking courses at a college level teaches you the intricate programming concepts and algorithms. Without taking data structures, assembly, operating systems, OOP, and so on at a college level, you're already at a disadvantage. Can you program a Windows/GTK application without taking those courses? Most likely. Can you write device drivers and system routines? No. "How do I sort this list?" Well, that depends on how fast it needs to be sorted, how much memory you have available, how big the list is, etc. "I'm making a list." Does it need to be an array of structures? Does it need to be a linked list? Does it need to be a doubly linked list? Does it need to be a binary tree? Does it need to be a tree? Most programmers don't have to deal with any of this stuff, but then again most programmers aren't great programmers.

I have ran into many programmers that didn't get their degree in computer science and didn't take any computer science courses in college, and they all fall in the same level. Mediocre. Again, anecdotal and stereotypical, but I'd wager that it's correct almost all the time.

My suggestion to the OP would be to (since middle ages is still not too old to become a great programmer, as long as you meet the other criteria of being a tinkerer) take some college courses in computer science. Over 1700 languages doesn't mean shit if you don't understand the concepts of programming (although concepts of something like LISP would be completely different than OOP and other traditional languages). Once you learn the concepts, then the rest is just syntax and concepts specific to the language you're learning, but without the basic concepts, you have no ground to stand on.

He acknowledged that there are risks around how the technology might be misused, but he said they're outweighed by the benefits:"The example I would offer is, would you not invent the telephone because of the possible misuse of the telephone by evil people? No, you would build the telephone and you would try to find a way to police the misuse of the telephone."

That's pretty much the exact same thing Musk argues, so I'm confused by how this is a disagreement. Is someone interpreting Musk as trying to hinder the development of AI? Is that why he employs a huge team of neural net developers at Tesla? Why he founded OpenAI? And Neuralink?

In the short term, next few decades, AI will have the effect of being able to concentrate power. Centralized information, with the ability to process it. Pervasive surveillance. We are seeing this actively pursued in China. And also semi-autonomous robot soldiers. This is uncharted territory.

AI will also be really handy, e.g. better Google searches, self driving cars, cheaper services. What happens to the unskilled workforce is very difficult to tell. Will alternative opportunities arise for them? In the short term, probably.

In the longer term, 50..200 years, the AI will become truly intelligent. It will be able to program itself. At that point it will no longer need humans, and it is difficult to see why it would want humans around. Note that this long term is the lifetimes of our grandchildren.

http://www.computersthink.com/

(Schmidt is hardly an unbiased commentator. He knows people are wary of Google's growing power and wants to be able to make money without pesky concerns about the future of humanity.)

Elon didnâ(TM)t say AI is evil. Schmidt is misrepresenting him. Why else would Elon start Open AI? Elon is wants a framework to use AI responsibly thatâ(TM)s all.... put his warnings the right context.

They both agree AI is the future and are right.

But Schmidt obviously do not want regulation and restraints on Googleâ(TM)s business model. Unfettered access to your personal and behaviour data to train the AI.

Schmidt is being very Evil by playing the game this way.

I think both of them are wrong too, but for other reasons.
The problem I see is that the smarter our helpers get, the dumber it allows us to be. Just look at computers for a good example of that. As they became ubiquitous and smarter on the inside, with user interfaces dumbed down for "everybody" to use, there was no longer a need for people to learn anything. Or calculators - people don't feel they need to understand even simple maths anymore, because there's a calculator (or calculator app, or google's built-in calculator) to do everything for them.
I truly fear that as the helpers get smarter, we get dumber. Only a few people will need to be smart enough to program them, but even that is dumbed down with higher and higher levels of abstractions.

AI will confer an ever greater first mover advantage than Trinity. It is also very easy to dress up in a friendly manner (at least relative to nukes). With AI, once the genie is out of the bottle, it's never going back in. Unless you're a guy like Schmidt, you *should* be terrified of it. You might get better navigation in your self driving car; but at what cost? And are the benefits even remotely distributed among society as a whole?

Basically, entrusting private companies like google with something of this magnitude is irresponsible bordering on insane.
We've reached a point in our technological evolution where every single human being on this planet could easily live a life of middle class security, with much left over. All AI is going to do is FURTHER concentrate wealth and power into a very select group of hands (and speaking of hands, i think Schmidt is showing his here). The rise of AI should be seen as an affront to human agency and dignity. We have two related trends: the growth of a knowledge economy, and the rise of automation. Gee, i wonder what the outcome will be?

Herbert was right, even way back when in 1965.

Sorry, but these things are tantamout to volunteering to be spied upon 24x7.

I'm sure they're cool and entertaining and may have some actual utility.

But I wouldn't be caught dead with one of the fucking things.

This problem is almost fixed: Without the albatross of net neutrality hanging on their shoulders, the ISPs have been freed up to focus like a laser on customer satisfaction. In a few short months, your ISP will be pampering you like royalty!

If you're a member of the class, you get $20 to $280, which is supposed to recompense you for the $5K you spent for the useless software...

The lawyers, of course, get the lion's share of the $5M....

I don't wanna get into the business of defending Tesla. Probably they did overhype their technology but I have a peeve with one avenue of criticism.

That is Tesla shouldn't have called it "Autopilot" because it leads buyers to believe that they are buying a self-driving car.

If you buy an airplane these days chances it has an "Autopilot" as well. Any half-trained pilot knows:

1. Autopilots come with different levels of capability.

2. No current commercial autopilot will keep you from flying the plane into the ground. (Fighter jets have this.)

3. No current autopilot will help you if you run out of fuel. If you think it does you will probably die.

4. The autopilot will fly the plane into weather conditions beyond its capability and everybody aboard will die.

5. The autopilot will be perfectly happy flying you into another plane. When this happens you will die and take the other plane with you.

Yet in spite of all these deficiencies they still call it "Autopilot" and have for 50 years or more and I never heard of a class action suit screaming about misleading advertising. Why? Because pilots (and certainly their instructors) pay attention to the product specifications and assign responsibility to the pilot accordingly. They practice using it and don't just expect to punch a button and have everything taken care of.

I suppose this is too much for the flaccid minds of the American consumer to absorb. So we get lawsuits. Well if the product was actually defective then OK or if Telsa lied about what it could do (beyond calling it "Autopilot") then OK but if it just turns out that the purchasers had unrealistic expectations then I hope it gets thrown out of court.

You are missing the key point of "autopilot" and the reason it's on boats and planes.

In the case of boats and planes, autopilots, regardless of how "sophisticated" they are, share one attribute -- they allow you to safely take your hands off the controls for significant periods of time (tens of seconds at least) and divert much/most of your attention to other matters (like looking at a chart). This will be preceded by the pilot making some sort of scan of the environment for hazards both fixed and mobile (in particular other boats and planes) by visual identification, radar, charts, etc and/or knowing that rules of the "road" (ATC imposed for planes) will insure a clear route.

Tesla autopilot fails to deliver on this expectation in two ways. First, the environment it is in coupled with its limited capabilities make it impossible to scan the environment in advance for hazards that will be encountered and that Teslapilot can't deal with (which, itself, appears quite difficult to predict). Second, it tends to run into stationary objects (fire engines, fire department maintenance trucks) and even, it appears, sometimes steers the car into them (gore points). If "autopilot" doesn't let you divert any attention from the road and, actually, makes you pay extra attention in case the car decides to steer into a fixed object, it simply is NOT "autopilot" as the typical consumer would expect it to be.

Now, if they actually listed which router/NAS models and firmware versions were problematic. Or how to diagnose if you were impacted...

If you have remote management turned on for your router or NAS, you should always expect special surprises.

I was thinking the same thing, so I went digging in the old (you know, that musty two-day old) slashdot thread. It wasn't straightforward to find it in there but there was a good comment with it. https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html. You can CTRL + F to "Known Affected Devices" and it has them listed. The original comment for aficionados.

These days a VPN is pretty much required.

Now a rant -- Rebooting a router, are you serious ? Give me a break. So now all requests are routed through a FBI server ? I feel much safer now that I rebooted a stupid router. How about forcing a recall

Posted Anonymously for a reason

No UPS?:P

Attaching a UPS to the squirrels is tempting, but I fail to see how it solves the original problem.

I am very very likely completely wrong, but I would speculate birds - flying birds - survived, and rapidly lost their power of flight, because it was no longer needed, because their predators were all dead.

That is very likely to have happened in any area that really lost all or most ground predators. It is the reason that flightless birds evolved in New Zealand and islands around the world. Although flightless birds have evolved on continents as well, their distribution on islands is notable, a large fraction of all flightless species hale from predator-free islands.

Both the article and the summary but not the actual paper make the claim that the only birds to survive were flightless. The actual paper talks about the demise of arboreal species. This makes sense as it is difficult for a tree-dwelling species to survive if the trees have gone. It does not follow that the survivors were necessarily flightless. Today most ground-dwelling species retain the ability to fly. And many of these have long, sturdy legs. Given that these kinds of birds don't tend to fly much, it is reasonable that many of these would adapt to a purely flightless lifestyle in the absence of predation. It does not follow that birds had to learn to fly all over again. Even if it took hundreds to thousands of years for the forests to recover, there should still be populations that retain flight ability allowing them to radiate back into the trees quickly.

chickens that aren't obese corn fed blubber balls can fly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

> Never understood how birds are the only remaining dinosaurs... wonder what
> made dinos so vulnerable to this event, where many other large species (crocs,
> turtles, fish, etc) survive to this day. One might think that some ***SMALL DINOSAURS***,
> or aquatic/marine species would have found a niche on some continent.

By "dinos", I assume you mean umpteen ton monstrosities. Most, if not all Cretaceous dinosaurs (even the large monstrosities) are now believd to have had feathers to maintain body tempearures. Birds == dinosaurs. It's not just the newer finds. Careful re-examination shows compsognathus == archeopteryx.

The big rock hits earth 65,000,000 years ago, and throws up a shower of debris out of the atmosphere. As the debris rains down all over planet earth, atmospheric friction heats up the incoming debris to several hundred degrees. This hail of red hot stones kills most large animals, and set most forests on fire.

Smaller particles remain in the atmosphere for a few years, blocking a lot of sunlight, and a "nuclear winter" happens. The bottom of the ecosystem (plants) gets greatly reduced. Forget large trees; you're down to hardy ferns Any large vegetarians that survived the initial "rain of fire" die of starvation, since they need a lot of plant matter every day to survive, let alone grow. When the remaining large vegetarians starve to death, there's no food for the large carnivores, so they starve to death.

Re your question about "small dinosaurs"... yes, some did survive. I repeat... birds == dinosaurs. The ones that survived were in the same size range as small mammals that survived. They occupied similar niches, and may have occupied burrows. If they couldn't dig burrows, they could chase out the small mammals who originally dug them. So when the big rock hit, small mammals and small dinosaurs (i.e. birds) that lived in burrows would've survived the initial "rain of fire". Burrows would be crucial for birds, because they lay eggs, rather than bearing their young via pregnancy.

Small dinosaurs ("birds") would compete in the same niches as small mammals, and we know that small mammals survived. Surviving birds at that time would probably be omnivores. They could eat small plants, with the occasional addition of meat in the form of insects and small mammals and even other birds.

IE6 demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Microsoft manages to get even the slightest lead over everyone else, their innovation will grind to a screeching halt and anything they do do will be exclusively for their own benefit.

I mean, we knew this already thanks to countless other examples of their behaviour, but IE6 is probably one of those visible and glaring, directly impacting the entire computer industry and internet.

Does Edge hog RAM like Chrome does?

I swear Chrome could store each page as a big ol' bitmap and still use less RAM than it does.

If you have access to the hypervisor you already have full control over the guests even without this "exploit." Why is this considered a big deal exactly?

"I feel like some of these stories are like Bob's Home Security fails to protect you if your wife is a serial killer."

To an extent they are, but if you are using cloud providers, the other tennants, and the monkeys at the cloud provider itself should all be considered potentially hostile.

And even within companies there is this (legitimate) concept that everyone in IT shouldn't hold the keys to payroll, finance, HR, and the R&D trade secretes... so there are lots scenarios where the people administering the systems, the servers, the cloud fabric etc, shouldn't be able to get access to the contents of the virtual machines.

All modern PC's were never designed with the thought in mind: There will be millions of attacks against this to try and break in.

We just didn't think about that when we designed this stuff, which was before the internet really took off. Of course it's all insecure and broken, it wasn't designed to be hardened against the countless ways security researchers are finding into these designs.

When the "forces that be" decide to scrap everything we've created upto now, and start anew, with a security focus right at the starting line, then we'd get some hardware and software platforms that're truly hardened against any attack.

Bandaids over the x86 paradigm? Waste of time. It's never going to be secure, not against everything everytime. It's just not designed to be secure, we didn't think it needed to be. We didn't think there'd be millions of malicious actors in the wild, with our computers all interconnected by the internet, so everything is exposed to everyone. We just didn't think that'd ever happen. It shows.

ZTE was getting a lot of its components from American suppliers and the ban could have hurt those suppliers financially. Some may even have reduced their work forces if demand dropped. This probably also plays into Trump's plans to get China to buy more American products to reduce the trade deficit.

There's also the remote chance that Trump has money invested in those American suppliers. We'll probably never know.

Trump suddenly became concerned about all of these Chinese employees right after China made a big investment in one of his hotels.
"Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reported last week that the Chinese government will provide $500 million in state loans to build MNC Lido City, a resort and theme park project in Indonesia that will include a golf course and hotels marked with the Trump name.
We have a new level of corruption.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the $500,000,000.00 that a Chinese government bank just poured into a failing Trump property in Indonesia.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

No quid pro quo. You're the quid pro quo.

They did pay a fine as part of the original settlement, and a moderately severe one, too. The Commerce Department's decision to ban them from buying American hardware and software was levied only after they failed to adhere to the terms of settlement, specifically, that several executives would be punished, fired, and receive no bonuses. They didn't follow up on punishing the executives, hence the ban.

It's not like this was a draconian move out of the blue - they were told ahead of time what the consequences would be for not doing what they agreed to do, and they did it anyway. I presume the assumption was that the Commerce Department wouldn't actually follow through with it, which turned out to be wrong.

'course, Trump's probably the most corrupt president we've ever had, so it turns out to have been a fine move by ZTE.

Spy Handler stated, in part:

China has been the #2 source of illegal immigrants to the US for a long long time, at least two decades. .... but it used to be very common to see headlines like,

"Cargo container seized at port of Long Beach found with fifty Chinese migrants living inside while being unloaded from cargo ship."

(Quote above edited to remove gratuitous xenophobia.)

The "#2" claim is bullshit - but the People's Republic is, in fact, a non-trivial source of unauthorized immigrants to the USA. According to the New York Times, there are currently 268,000 of them here.

That number is dwarfed by the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, but it's still more than the population of Newark, NJ (at least, as of the 2010 census). And China refuses to accept deportees, so we're basically stuck with them, even if the current administration manages to locate them all - which it won't, because it's focused exclusively on Hispanics.

It's also worth noting that Chinese immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, tend to be younger, and have skills that are better-suited to the American job market, than the average Hispanic immigrant. They also tend not to arrive in shipping containers. Most of them arrive legally, on tourist visas - which they blithely overstay, because there's nowhere near the level of effort expended on tracking them down as there is on tracking down Hispanics.

In my experience (and I know several such Chinese), they tend to be highly entrepreneurial. The ones I know are engaged in smuggling consumer goods - not from China to the USA, but from the USA to China. (Levis 501's are hugely popular - and extremely costly - in China, for instance.) In a twisted way, you could say they're actually contributing to this country's economy, and doing a tiny bit to redress our trade imbalance with China.

In another way, you could say they're probably laundering money for the Chinese mob - and I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you'd be right ...

Is the game mocking mass shootings, or glorifying them, or something in between?

Whatever it's doing, it sure looks clumsy and tasteless from here.

You think? What about the complete disparity between people getting angry about a game involving school shootings, while also having absolutely no willpower to actually do anything about real school shootings?

Ih, there's plenty of will power to do "something" ... the problem is that none of the "something's proposed would actually do anything useful.

Back in ancient times of game systems, in Seven Cities of Gold (I think) on the Atari, you could wantonly attack peaceful Indians ... or keep slaughtering ones that had stopped resisting.

They went into some kind of weird tribal dance of utter despair that really freaked me out and made me never want to try that again. Brrr.

But my point is you could do it.

Granted, they were so pixilated and cartoonish that I don't think even those who believe video games inspire violence could really think that game would ... so it;s not quite the same thing.

"there is insufficient political support for that"

That would be the no willpower to actually do anything problem.

In actual fact, there's lots of will, including political support to do it. Polls in the US show a majority of voters favour increased gun control. Problem is, there's a very vocal minority making everyone believe there's no will.