_Y_

Well they are replacing scientist(or lab assistants) and doctors, who is to say any human endeavor can't be automated?

That seems to be the right way to fight these things, if those that have been abused as children are against this law, then this law isn't to protect the children, but to simply push it under the rug.

I don't they are so much coming back, as they are probably moving to some other country (e.g. India).

Wait there was a xkcd comic about that: http://xkcd.com/605/

Speaking of 'necessity as the mother of invention' were there any research on how to increase birth rate? I remember something about Russia increasing it's birth rate, but I don't remember how.

I'd say he was probably going for more uniqueness factor. Lack of care of capitalization, shows just that - lack of care and possible desire to break the norms.

You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.

You can call it a heuristic or a guideline, but I consider them essential. Perfectly rational agents without empathy can commits massive acts of evil trying to achieve their goal. Or as the proverb says "Road to hell is paved with good intentions".

And I don't think short-sightedness or ill-informing was ever an integral part with arguing about how empathy is essential to human live. IIRC there was an example of perfectly informed and rational computer of super human intelligence who was told to calculate a particularly difficult equation, to which he promptly restructured all matter on earth, including people into a giant super-computer.

I'd like slightly disagree. I do think more people needs to be analytical but without empathy and morality all hacker qualities would be rendered meaningless and pointless.

As a hacker without empathic skills I could pick any goal and ruthlessly implement it: Goal: Need more organ donors 1. People are unwilling to donate organs 2. Force all prisoners on death row to give away they organs for staying in death row accommodation 3. Kill them in ways that doesn't hurt the organs (they might suffer some inconvenience) 4. Harvest organs

As Charlie Chaplin in Great Dictator said: "More than machinery we need humanity, more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness, without these qualities life would be violent and all would be lost."

It may or may not be. It's not false but neither is it true. Strictly logically speaking.

And in a sense both can be considered as different pleasures - eating derives joy from taste and painting derives joy from fine craftsmanship.

I doubt it. If evolution really needed death then why does an immortal jelly-fish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula) exist? Granted their final life stage is a polyp which creates a new young medusa, but there theoretically could be a specimen that is 7 millions years old. Either way they wouldn't need to change for number of generations.

I'd like to see him explaining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect or how Gary Kasparov was beaten (well tied at first) by a computer. I mean did Gary got really dumber in span of a year or so?

I think the reason people somewhat erroneously try to 'robotize' people is the fact that they want consistency even if the quality is poorer.

I'd say plethora is wrong at least in US. Ridiculous retroactive copyright extensions would be my main gripe (though I doubt Grooveshark has any works that are about to become public domain). Or creative accounting that makes artist indebted even if their song is sold in millions.

Also I have a suspicion that most people use Grooveshark as a form of radio in such way that it doesn't really feed on artists main source of profit (CDs and concerts).

However don't take this out of context I still dislike lack of any mechanisms for artist reimbursement.

Or how another cheap "Yo dawg" joke started.

Sorry to nag, but how is outputting to LLVM bitcode not interpreting? You are taking source code and turning it into intermediate form (i.e. LLVM bitcode), no?

Indeed I also quite liked his RSAnimate talk on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Why waste bombs. If you can create wormholes at arbitrary locations just teleport piece of a star into a planet.

"Let's link to a internally consistent version of Groups that doesn't look like the old familiar one..."

Fixed it for you.

I doubt it will be that drastic. I'd really like to see how this plays out. I get the feeling like the Zenith of USA has passed but overall I could just be that my info sources are libertian/biased.

There will always be unknown things and things to achieve! There is still nuclear fusion, computer brain interface, genetic engineering, inhabiting other planets. Figuring out how universe works, if there are other realities, etc.

My personal thoughts are that communism is merely the next step after capitalism (after discovering fusion and fabricating nanotechnology), however I don't think/hope it will play out as it had before in Russia.

Correction: automation can replace doctors and researchers (which principally work with their mind).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090402-robot... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/131697.stm

I'd like to address your WoG example. Firstly there are two types of pirates. Those that don't have the money to ever buy, those that have money. The first (and arguably largest group) will NEVER be your customer. These are people that can barely afford their internet. If there was no piracy these people would never get your game. Second group consists of two subgroups - those that might pay and those that wont. I'd argue that the first group is larger based on examples below. Also there are some transitions from people that can't pay into a group that might pay (e.g. a student gets a high paying job and can afford books/software that he pirated before). However they are not a crux of my concerns. I think the value of piracy is a "word of mouth" advertisements. Even if only people that can't afford your game and pirate it there is going to be boon for your business (e.g. poor kid might have someone who is a bit richer and will buy the game to show off) if they spread good word about it.

"First is Monthy Python. A while back, the Monty Python team made a shedload of their sketches freely available in high quality on their own YouTube channel, hoping that as a result people would buy more DVDs. According to this widely linked story, the experiment has been not just successful, but wildly, crazily so. They’re reporting that sales of Monty Python DVDs at Amazon have increased by 23,000% — that’s 231-fold — since they made all that material available on Youtube."

(Neil Gaiman on books he published for free) "Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.

"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing." "

Source: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/everyone-wins/

Umm, I'd say Scala is to Java what C# was to Java. It cleared some things at expense of come other things. Overall it's pretty cool language (I rarely use :P).

What does cons operator mean? Concatenation? Constructor? Other than hello world I haven't done much Scala.

Didn't Stephen already linked to Fantom :P (which is quite a coincidence since Fantom uses Hg as it's DVCS of choice).

Disclaimer I like Fantom and it is my language of choice. That said, I agree he (Stephen) for every fault he finds Scala finds a way to recommend Fantom. That strikes me as dubious.

Nevertheless I find this statement:

> Scala is lightyears ahead of Fantom and Fantom will probably never catch up. If Fantom can't win on technical merit, then apparently the next best strategy involves negative blogging!

Baseless at best. In what aspect is Scala lightyears ahead?

Also what are you implying by saying 'if it can't win on technical merit then best strategy involves negative blogging!'

First Stephen is just one guy. Second I think Stephen just likes Fantom for the same reasons he dislikes Scala and wanted to blog about it.

The authors and the community have overall been quite ambivalent to Scala. As witnessed by this blog from one of Fantom's authors: http://fantom.org/sidewalk/topic/675

Heh to a Java programmer, the answer would be - everything.

Here are my thoughts on it. - I get val myList is some sort of list... - Seems to be a list of Strings. But what is ::? - Nil means list is nullable. Wait is one of the parts of list 'myList(println)' (looks a bit like Smalltalk)? - Why is println the argument and not the method? Is that syntax correct?!

Compare same thing in Fantom. Note ; is only used as a separator and is equal in all respects to '\n'.

     myList := ["Jim", "Bob", null]; echo(myList)