nmrm

There's some speculation about where the next breakthroughs will come from at the end of the chapter; it will be interesting to look back in 10-20 years and see if Knuth was correct.

The US seems to have been in a cultural decline for much of the last 100 years.

Can you explain what, exactly, you mean by this? Looking back 100 years, I can't help but see an enormous amount of improvement in culture, at least in terms of the tangible impact of culture on the lives of people living in the USA.

And in fact, if you read the article about Tide, the people who are buying Tide, no questions asked, from anyone who wants to sell it to them are committing felonies and are tracked down in sting operations.

I've worked with a lot of contractors. Invariably, if you bitch about guberment and then have a polite chat with the ones who make these kinds of offers, they're trying to get around paying taxes. This might be anecdotal, but it's not pure speculation.

You can disagree with the tax system in the US, but that doesn't make tax evasion legal.

(in fact, just today a contractor offered me no tax if I paid him cash...)

Which means he's probably not paying tax on that himself. Which is tax evasion, pure and simple. Which is illegal for good reasons.

Those are still executed in some order.

Not really. E.g. there's no ordering in function composition that isn't also in high school math. Also, you shouldn't depend on e.g. maps processing elements in a given order.

My impression is that statement ordering is easier for mediocre but competent programmers than it is for excellent programmers. The reason is that writing correct imperative code is non-trivial, but writing correct-y imperative code is pretty easy. So someone who's carefully thinking things through while learning will have a more difficult time with simple assignments, because -- at least while learning -- they're essentially trying to construct the correctness proof in their head. And that's pretty hard for imperative code.

which incorporates the notion of time and communication of proof.

Certainly constructive logics (typically) incorporate a notion of evidence/proof. But constructive logics don't incorporate notions of time or communication (of proof, or in general).

I think the point of the bulk of the document was to demonstrate that lots of good hypotheses aren't being tested (in the US).

i didn't get whether they were able to show an actual path of how UA could have occurred

I think the answer is no -- there was never a clear demonstration of an extant buggy execution trace. Just a preponderance of evidence that such a trace could exist.

I believe that when the recalls occurred, at least several models of Toyota/Lexus cars were affected.

Ultimately, it's impossible to know without being inside. I would imagine there's a fair bit of reuse within each manufacturer and very little sharing between manufacturers

Are the police allowed to act on charges and arrest individuals?

Yes. Although the arrest can happen before the charge, typically a judge will issue an arrest warrant as soon as the charges are filed.

And given the >90% conviction success rate in the USA (at least in federal cases), it's a pretty good bet any charges filed will stick if the prosecutor wants them to.

I think the logic goes that out of everyone at this company -- probably dozens or hundreds since OP says it's well known locally -- OP was the one that the plaintiff knew about and called up. Probably because the OP is a big-mouthed trouble maker and everyone knew it. Or something.

Whereas everyone else at the company were good team-players and kept their mouth shut and head down, so the plaintiff wasn't sure if s/he could count on their testimony or if they even knew anything.

Again, just explaining how someone might fear the logic would go. Not saying anyone does or should actually think like this.

Of course if you conflate logic with just traditional first order logic then all the interesting fruit has been picked.

But there are many logics that can be used to reason about stochastic and probabilistic dynamics.

From the article: Situations Where A Client/Server RDBMS May Work Better... High Concurrency: SQLite supports an unlimited number of simultaneous readers, but it will only allow one writer at any instant in time.

I've used SQLite over NFS for replication. It worked fine.

There are Ikeas in the US.

If you are not near an Ikea and can't think of an excuse to do a day road trip to the nearest one, you might consider some of the motorized/adjustable desks on Amazon (just search for those terms).

He did nothing illegal, but (admittedly) acted a bit dodgy with the wrong (or right, if you want a good story) sorts of people.

Arbitrary page limits cause far more harm than good in academic writing.

Dissertations and journal articles are some of the most readable and useful academic publications in computer science precisely because this attitude of "16 pages of bits ought to be enough for anyone" isn't enforced.

Without artificial page limits, it's possible to explain an idea from the ground up without taking shortcuts. Enforcing a prohibitive page limit is far more likely to force clever writing than good communication.

3 cups of espresso would be a fantastic amount of coffee. You'd actually have a medical condition of you drank that much espresso every day:

~64 mg caffeine / ounce in espresso

64 mg/ounce * 8 ounces * 3 = 1536 mg

From wikipedia: "Consumption of 1000–1500 mg per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism."

It is. Typically if you publish in a respected and peer reviewed journal, you are required to disclose sources of funding in the article. Especially if those sources include for-profit companies, you're in for a world of hurt if you don't.

But the "scientific community", so far as such a thing exists, can't censure news reports, government reports, or corporate reports that claim "X is true because science". It also cannot stop someone from publishing a "scientific" journal.

"Science" is not a Trade Mark, and scientists cannot solve for clueless consumers who believe everything if you say "because science!" Especially when those same consumers fail to fund / pay attention in quality post-secondary science education.

The research[1]

says that billboards help sell stuff. So do online ads. Unfortunately there's no RL ad block for those of us who don't like ugly.

I'd argue these[2] are anything but.

I'll take nature or architecture, thanks.

Yes. And ugly.

Graduate degrees make sense almost always, as long as the prestige and quality of the graduate program is an order of magnitude better than your undergraduate alma mater.

The calculation is trivial -- top masters programs often publish entry and mid career salary information.

I tend to both agree and disagree with this assessment.

Highly skilled programmers, as well as programmers whose jobs are dominated by both design and implementation, will probably be one of the last professions to be replaced by AI.

But there are a lot of programmers who could be replaced by automation (although various constrained, "domain-specific" forms of program synthesis working on concert with ever-improving development environments, libraries and frameworks are probably more likely culprits.

edit: In other words, the general problem of replacing programmers is AI-complete, but not ever programming task/job requires full generality.

I think the OP's point is that the phone is never going to replace cash/cards because going without an mp3 player or notebook during a night out or work day is NBD, but surviving without any access to money can make things very unpleasant. Also, I'll always need a wallet for ID, insurance info, etc. What's one more piece of plastic?

So it makes sense I wouldn't want to carry around a phone + an mp3 player. But if I'm carrying around cash/cards everywhere anyways, the phone needs to have an actual substantive benefit over paying with plastic. That advantage has to overcome the perception of privacy violations and the cost of changing personal habits.

* The days of the average consumer not caring about privacy are, I think and hope, coming quickly to an end. I doubt anyone will give up gmail out of privacy concerns, but any time there's discussion of adopting a new consumer product, average Joe off the street will probably cite privacy as one concern. I don't think the "novelty factor" is enough to win over the average consumer's data these days.

Would you consider a (perhaps accelerated) degree program?

I understand this might not be possible in your situation, but if you can find an evening, on-site, accelerated program at a local non-flagship state school then you might be missing an opportunity. I've known some people in similar situations for whom this approach worked out well.

I can provide some advice if this is at all plausible for you.

(edit: the comment by ferrari8608 is an excellent example of why attending an inexpensive university can be a good idea, even without finishing the degree program; you'd be surprised at the number of positions filled via "former professor" relationships).

A business wanting to make more money by charging for their good/bad/ok product? how evil.

A business encouraging governments to throw people in jail for something which has never been considered a criminal infraction in order to make more money is pretty evil.

I would never dream of asking a government to throw somebody in jail for pirating my software. The benefit that I get (ostensibly deterrence) is minuscule in comparison to the human cost of a criminal record and even a short stint in jail.

This was the concept between some subsidized housing in the mid 20th century, and was for the most part a failed experiment in architecture.

The two significant differences here are 1) government officials and law enforcement are part of the housing complex and not external; 2) since they aren't housing projects, the buildings don't have automatic class stigma.

"And I think that's what a lot of professors forget - BE MORE INTERESTING. Have a better presentation style. Take public speaking classes. Do something to make yourself stand out above the distraction of internet and devices."

Have you done a lot of teaching?

As a matter of fact, managing a course-long sequence of lectures in a way that keeps everyone engaged is infinitely more difficult than keeping everyone engaged in a one-off conference presentation.

Your entire comment supposes that the content is interesting to the entire class, that you're moving at an appropriate rate for everyone in the course. This is never the case.

I don't care how engaging the lecturer is. If it's a lecture on linked lists (or something else I already know about) then, unless I plan on teaching in the future, I'm going to get work done instead of listening. Similarly, if the lecturer takes a class period to pound in an important concept I've already internalized, I'm going to get something done while s/he catches the rest of the class up.

The only way to make sure everyone has good reason to pay attention is to teach a very difficult topic. Which is why "not paying attention" is nearly non-existent in canonically difficult courses, regardless of the quality of presentation style.

The distinction/dichotomy is over-blown. It may be that most people you work with have CS degrees, but that doesn't mean most people you work with aren't self-taught.

That's because most self-taught programmers end up with degrees -- either in CS or other fields. All of the good programmers I know had substantial personal projects and/or open source contributions before starting college, and continued throughout college.

The answer also depends on what problems you'd like to work on and where you'd like to work.

You can have endless domain knowledge, and not an original thought in your head.

I hear this a lot, and don't think it's at all true. It's pretty difficult to get to phd-level background in an area without having some thoughts no one else has explored yet. In fact I'm not sure it's even possible.