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Yeah, you have to think that was a joke, right? Can you imagine the headlines, "Google Drone kills 7 on Somali border"

And I don't get why they should use Bitcoin. You're trying to secure your data, not obfuscate your financial transactions.

I think the point was that now that so much of our interactions take place through our phone it is very easy to migrate to new platforms. Think of how quickly Snapchat or Instagram spread for example. I doubt they would have been nearly as popular if they were web apps.

I started out using vim because when I first looked at it and emacs, vim seemed like the more elegant of the two. I tried both out one afternoon, and the commands in vim made more sense to me than those in emacs. But after taking a class where we were basically forced to use emacs, I've really come to appreciate it more and have found myself much more productive in it than in vim.

Just a nit-picky thing, but I thought it would be nice to get a heads-up. In the third sentence of the first paragraph it should be "your senators" rather than "you're senators"

The only problem I see with this is that value isn't always proportional to time. Sometimes I spend a long time reading an article because it is written in an inscrutable style and it takes a long time to see what the author is saying. Other authors write so well that I can follow their arguments as fast as I can read. All other things being equal, the later article is more valuable, but I spend more time on the former article.

See how that entry says "usu. with negative or in questions"? The usage in this case is neither negative nor a question, and so many, like the gp and myself, found it confusing.

A similar thing happened to me. I picked it up, read 200-300 pages and thought I could see where the book was going but found that it took such an agonizingly long time to reach its conclusion that I put it down.

Ah, thanks for that info, I wasn't aware that the time from development to deployment was that low now.

My guess would be this is more for capital reasons than legal ones. It is extremely expensive to form a company of either type. I think the standard drug pipeline costs somewhere between 10s of millions to billions of dollars per drug. I'd imagine that the cost for medical device development and approval is similar.

I've heard that almost the entire flight can be/is automated now, including the landing and that most commercial pilots have to land the planes by hand just so they can keep their skills up. But I doubt the salary of pilots is really such a significant cost for airlines compared to their other expenses, otherwise we'd probably be seeing a push for autonomous aircraft.

Also: think of how much the TSA would love autonomous aircraft, you never need to worry about them being hijacked because they'll only go where the computer tells them too.

Thanks for the awesome reply! I think you've just convinced me to check out Haskell more thoroughly at the next chance I get.

Edit: It's great that you mention OCaml's module system too; my professor probably mentions the benefits of it in just about every lecture.

I'm curious what advantages you think Haskell has over ML/Ocaml. I'm pretty familiar with OCaml and like it a lot, and Haskell seems to be very similar, but I haven't used it for anything substantive. What benefits, if any, does Haskell have over Ocaml, and is it worth learning if one already knows Ocaml? I know that Haskell has lazy evaluation while Ocaml doesn't, but you can simulate lazy evaluation in Ocaml.

I think the difference is we all come in contact with writing every day. So literacy is required if you want to get around in the world and if you want to communicate with others. Almost no non-programmers encounter code in their day to day lives. To me it doesn't make since for the majority of people to learn to code, because without practice their skills are just going to atrophy. Why add a ton of new people who can only write shitty code? We already have enough of those, I don't see the reason to add more. Programming well is hard and if you don't spend a lot of time with it you'll never get good.

Over the past week or so I've seen a lot of food and diet related articles make the front page, and in the comments everyone is going on about how great their favorite diet is and how the science proves that it is the most effective way to lose weight. None of these people show any evidence however that their weight loss came from anything other than calories out > calories in. It's refreshing to see at least a few people like yourself who believe otherwise.