Posts by Carstairs 7 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2016
Do you want unreliable-AI-of-choice translating from COBOL to whatever? Especially as much (probably most) COBOL is dealing with someone's finances - e.g. payroll, pension, social security, unemployment, ...
And if people chose to use AI for the translation, do you think they'll bother with proper testing?
Translators like f2c (a well-designed, well tested, Fortran to C translator) - yes. Flakey AI - definitely no.
I do know someone with a confirmed COVID-19 infection. He's been in hospital, on a ventilator for about a week - and only today he's starting to show some signs of improvement. And he's 30-odd, and was apparently fit and healthy.
I also know a couple of other people with what is probably COVID-19, but since testing is so hard to obtain, who knows for sure. Fortunately, they aren't in hospital. Just "very bad flu, and bad breathing" (but lasting a lot longer that flu normally does).
Some religious writings are great literature - and so can be appropriate in some circumstances even if they're not from your religion.
So, in my (atheist) opinion, that Genesis reading was very appropriate for the situation - and very powerful.
To give a different example: the well-known example after the Trinity nuclear test:
Oppenheimer:
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
[Wikipedia's words - but I read that in various places long before Wikipedia existed]
Last I heard, the Internet was essentially a commercialization of Arpanet - a network sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a subdivision of the (US) Department of Defense. So the US govt really did have legitimate control of it, back in the day.
On a side note: it's an example of government doing a good job. It paid for the original R&D - and later commercial funding helped to take it to the world-wide audience.
AFAIK, the word "scrum" is only used in two contexts. Rugby, and "agile" programming. Rugby came first by many years (100 or more).
As anyone who has played, or watched, rugby will know - a rugby scrum is very definitely *not* agile. Heavy, powerful, whatever - but *not* agile. So what bright spark choose to miss-reuse "scrum" for meetings in an "agile" context?
And if you're going to appropriate the word "scrum", why not also the related words like "scrum-half", and "hooker", etc?
There are, I understand, a lot of cases in the USA where a child gets hold of a gun and accidentally shoots someone. And also, I have read, a surprisingly large number of cases where policemen get shot with their own gun. (Hard to get good stats: the gun lobby in the USA seems to be against them.) Both of which, "smart guns" could prevent.
But - if I was a person who thought I should have a gun for self-defense, I would really want a non-smart gun. Why? Because of my experience with technology over the last ~ 30 years. Personal computers; electronics in cars; the way my phone or laptop sometimes don't react to my finger; etc - all have a nasty tendency to be unreliable these days. And if I thought it was worth having a gun around, I would want to be as sure as possible that it would work properly if I needed it.
Potentially, technology could work well - but I'd want a decade or two of evidence to convince me.
Looking at things from a different point of view: some years back, driving while drunk was regarded as sort-of-normal - and the accidents which happened because of that were "just accidents". It seems to me that in the USA shootings still tend to be regarded like that. Perhaps we should try for a society which requires a suitably higher standard from any/all gun owners. (Shooting while drunk, or not being able to properly see what's in the way, or just-because-the-person-in-front-of-you-*might*-be-a-danger all seem to be rather too accepted.)
All my condolences to his family and friends - extra sad to lose him so (relatively) young - and (I presume) suddenly.
On a professional level, his articles (whether on the relatively-low-budget science and engineering SPB stuff), or foodstuffs, or downright daft stuff, were often informative, and *always* entertaining - in a heartwarming way.
(The IT content was often non-existent, but who cares ...)
A person who notably enriched life.
Again - all my sympathies to family and friends.
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