javanix

This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read.

There are nothing but complaints about Google's lack of personal customer service in regards to their AdSense program - what makes you think that future AI projects from the company would be any better?

Just because Google's made a self-driving car doesn't mean they're automatically the front-runner in that category. What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year?

Also, the advantages that Maroon mentions (especially the safety ones) would most likely only come to fruition once self-driving cars become ubiquitous - something that its hard to imagine happening within the near future (or at least during the current incarnation of Google as we know it).

I really can't imagine that this is the first time this particular move was tried.

Google had been a dominant search engine for years before they went public, and I can't imagine they turned down many $50 billion funding rounds simply to avoid turning public before their IPO.

Yes, hard filters at a place like Google would quickly get out of hand.

Not to mention probably calling down the wrath of the FTC for anti-competition violations.

I flew on the Concorde at the EAA AirVenture (or whatever it was called back then) fly-in in 1994.

The thing I remember most about it was the ridiculously steep takeoff angle - that was when you could really tell you were on a different breed of aircraft than your standard Boeing.

I think people's participation would be much higher in such a program if the rewards were linked to an existing platform.

People have been trying to game-ify real life for years and its never gained much traction. I think this is because people have to sign up for something additional, and at that point (unless the program gains a lot of steam with a lot of people) there's not much tying individuals in.

An interesting article, but I have to disagree with his conclusions about the effect on malware.

I'd say that mainstream Linux adoption would likely be dominated by 1 or 2 major distros, like Ubuntu. Any potential attack vector could be targeted at that distro's package management system, for instance, and be assured of some impact.

In addition, many distros share a common underlying base system (like Debian) - any child distros of a vulnerable system would also presumably share the same vulnerabilities.

I'd like to see a real translation of this article before I draw any conclusions.

Google translate is decent (and getting better) but I'm not sure I trust it yet for international diplomatic translations.

Charles Stross is a very intelligent individual.

If anyone here hasn't read Accelerando I highly recommend it.

If true, this is by far the most intelligent article I've ever read from the Post.

What is PG's so-called "hacker radar" if not some analogue to the "hacker acceptance factor" that I tried to allude to?

People think that languages like Python and Ruby are "cooler" somehow than Java - that's all I was trying to get at.

I don't think that I was making any judgments about the validity of that opinion, but I would say that it is fairly pervasive for better or for worse, and for many of the reasons that PG alluded to.

Agreed, there are certainly exceptions to the rule but I don't think anyone would put the level of Java's "hacker acceptance factor" anywhere near Python or Ruby or the like.

Sort of ironic that all of his concerns were proven out, yet Java still managed to prove his prediction wrong.

Though his definition of success seems to be "would really good programmers (wizards) ever use this language for sweet projects? If yes, than this language is a success." By that metric I guess he would be correct.

Perhaps I should have said "protection of state secrets out of context".

My main concern isn't that these secrets are getting exposed, its that they are getting exposed in a way that is easily editorialized by whoever is distributing them. Ordinarily US citizens wouldn't have access to our country's diplomatic cables (even though other countries might) - now we do have them, yet we have absolutely no way of verifying that we've gotten the unadulterated whole of them. That is what concerns me.

Well, true, but I've always read that as him not wanting to become the same sort of political lighting-rod that he hates. He was very careful to avoid any overt political associations for his rally, for instance.

There are also legitimate concerns over the protection of state secrets.

WikiLeaks and other whistleblowers form an important part of modern society, but we should also be wary of single-spigot fountains of information that come via unverifiable channels. After all, the leaking of false information to promote an agenda is a time-honored tradition of statecraft.

Well, Jon Stewart for one, when he isn't being just a stand-up, does tend to call out major journalistic and political figures for their inadequacies in this regard.

Weird. It was apparently easier to get into MIT in the late 19th century than it was to pass the eighth grade.

I think my favorite part of this was:

It has culminated in the WebBase project whose aims are to maintain a local copy of the World Wide Web

Weird to think that a local copy of the internet was actually feasible only twelve years ago.

The only thing I would ever use this for would be legal files shared with friends - I'm not sure how often Amazon ripples their IP addresses, but I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would have a field day with an IP address linked to a billing account in the US.

No, this does not herald the future.

This heralds the relatively-recent arrival of advanced statistics to the college basketball world - rebounding percentages, scoring percentages, runs -- these are pieces of information anyone could glean by simply looking at a box score, or, at worst, looking at a site with advanced metrics like www.kenpomeroy.com.

All of the game recaps read basically the same - a sure sign of a homogenous data set combined with some fairly crafty name-replacement.

Perhaps this could replace the AP game recaps, but anything beyond that is still far beyond our AI reach.

Huh, cool - I never really looked into what goes into doing compiler optimizations.

What sort of gains would we be looking at with syntactic language differences taken into account?

For instance, suppose I wrote some program in C, compiled, and ran it with the latest GCC/LLVM. If I wrote a program in Python (or Lua) and compiled it down to bare bytecode with a comparably optimized compiler - no interpreter or JIT happenings - would there be a large number of optimizations that just couldn't happen for one language or the other?

Very true.

Syntax doesn't really matter in terms of performance - what matters is compiler optimizations. Theoretically someone, if they had a mind, could optimize a Python compiler to run just as fast as C (or at least as fast as a non-statically typed language can run).

With that in mind, perhaps some sort of modification to the JVM (or a competing VM that isn't controlled by Oracle) that provides an aggressively raw metal code would be an ideal future - the advantages of whatever language you want to use + speed and portability would be awesome.

I really hope that game and other performance-dependent development moves to Go or something like it, rather than being stuck in C/C++ land.

The advantages of modern syntax design coupled with a fast native compiler would be a potent and exciting mix.

You know, 42 feet per gallon sounds pretty terrible, but I'd say moving 5.5 million pounds of equipment 42 feet with one gallon of gas is pretty damn impressive.

That's not quite the same situation as hardware hacking - DirectTV's countermeasures basically come down to detecting fraud and disabling the users, not preventing it completely.

What just about all consumer electronics companies have failed to do is lock down their hardware from being hacked in the first place - after all, Sony and Apple also pay some of the best in the world, and the PS3 and iPhone have been cracked wide open with software.

Microsoft is certainly better than most (the 360 doesn't yet have a software patch - there are hardware solutions - that can be used for piracy), but they are by no means immune to hackers.

I personally wouldn't use this for gadget recommendations - I am too picky and enjoy the research process too much.

However, for buying a toaster or a microwave or something, I can definitely see this site being useful. Usually I end up going to the store and picking something out based on the blurbs on the packaging - not exactly a prime source of impartial data.

A confusion that could be mitigated by a less-inflammatory title.

Fortunately, with ESPN3 I think things are getting better (and we'll eventually get to the point of full IPTV), but until every big game is available officially online, there's just going to be no way for me to ditch cable completely.

Yes, I get the same way.

My CS courses were basically all dependent on exam scores - I would estimate that on average 75% of the course grades came from exams.

In some of the courses, even as late as my 3rd and 4th years, people weren't able to complete projects that had even moderate amounts of coding, even in Java. I would much rather have seen a more 50/50 grading scale (at least in courses that it made sense for - I don't see much of a way to get around exams in theory courses) so that a good grade would require strength in both application and theory.

I loved C when I was in college. Unfortunately, the university I attended had a CS department that required both a lot of time, and Java for most coursework, so I didn't get to do it enough. Hence, applying for jobs with C in mind wasn't really an option unless I could impress upon someone my desire to learn it.