Peter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences pretty well in his novel Blindsight. One thing I took from it is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave exactly like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing sympathy toward another person, for example, would be inconceivable without consciousness.
Using the type system to implement a Natural Numbers Object[1] is pretty clever. Doing math with it is not exactly efficient, but it does prove it works.
The US government's official numbers for 2019 [1] only show 131k jobs for "information security analysts" and they project 171k by 2029. The total for computer, network and database administrators is only around 500k.
Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all the way to the left first.
I negotiated a deal at a former employer where I worked 4 x 9.5 hour days with Wednesdays off. I took a 5% pay cut and lost a proportional amount of vacation time. I kept my benefits but had to pay a slightly higher share for my contribution to the health care plan. It worked out very well—I especially liked having Wednesdays to run errands when government offices and banks etc. were open.
I'm in the USA and this polemical strawman is standard fare on Murdoch's Fox News. It's just a lazy way of dismissing the issue without real discussion.
You should be very glad you did not move to the UK. The Home Office has a backlog of 320,000 unprocessed applications for residency status, according to a recent Guardian article. [1] These people will be in legal limbo with no right to remain in the UK after June 30th if the backlog is not cleared.
This week's Brexit & Beyond [1] mentioned this and I forgot to follow up on the link, so thank you. Performative cruelty for the masses while the Government talks up the great and wonderful success that is Brexit is only to be expected, I guess.
Wow, it didn't work at all on my desktop. It thinks I have 23 apps from its list installed, on both Firefox and Chrome. Pretty funny seeing that on a Linux box running CentOS 7. Even better, it detects a different app on each as the only one missing: on Firefox it says I don't have Skype installed, while on Chrome it says I don't have Hotspot Shield installed.
The Sun RPC code had a loop where it allocated one page at a time and filled an array with the returned pointers. The article says there was a 500% performance improvement after replacing the loop with a single call to the batch allocator. (While RPC can be thought of as networking code, it is more than just network packet flow.)
There are probably other places where this will help. Now that the interface is available, developers can start trying it.
Figure 2 in that article, illustrating a constant-width figure with three sides (a Reuleaux triangle), reminded me of a science fiction story from long ago. I finally found the title: it's "The Three-Cornered Wheel" by Poul Anderson. A spaceship crew on an alien planet needs to transport something heavy but the natives worship circles and won't let them use cylindrical rollers. They eventually find a solution that satisfies everyone.