And now it is showing up. Never mind X|

I couldn't find this using the Search, so I thought I'd share. Programming Sucks[^] A few exerpts:

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over. There's a theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are more "standards" than there are things computers can actually do, and these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you're familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that's involved, because standards are unicorns.

You can't restart the internet. Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and "good enough for now" code with comments like "TODO: FIX THIS IT'S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG" that were written ten years ago. I haven't even mentioned the legions of people attacking various parts of the internet for espionage and profit or because they're bored. Ever heard of 4chan? 4chan might destroy your life and business because they decided they didn't like you for an afternoon, and we don't even worry about 4chan because another nuke doesn't make that much difference in a nuclear winter.

Can I get an "Amen!"

I learned to bake bread 30 years ago. Fun hobby, and you can get very good quality stuff for a lot less than from an "artisan" bakery. It's also handy, being able to make your specialty stuff, from basic pizza crust to fancy braided wreaths for holiday suppers, when and as you want it.

Arvixe looks good, and its rating on every ratings site I've checked is much higher than GoDaddy. I think that might be the ticket, thanks!

If I need to move this to a different forum, I will. Since this is the biggest group of computer geeks I know.... :-D I have been struggling with GoDaddy for a few years, mainly because they are inexpensive and my needs are minimal. But a current project has been giving me fits with WordPress, and last week, GD quietly eliminated support via email. Now if you have any problems, you must actually contact a live person. From what I've been reading, wait times of more than an hour are typical, and you get connected to someone who is first a salesperson pushing "upgrades" rather than someone who can actually provide technical assistance. That's the last straw, and I want to move. So: I am looking for a new web hosting based in the United States. The host needs to support both ASP.Net, and offer WordPress. The two sites I will be moving are low traffic, so a shared server is fine. Cost is an issue, of course, but I have some wiggle room. I would much rather deal with an established company with a good reputation than a recent start-up. One that won't constantly spam me would be nice, but that is probably asking for too much. Any suggestions? Added: Forgot to mention that I use .Net 3.5. If push comes to shove, I can port over to PHP: I prefer .Net as I have a dev environment for that.

The complete list[^]. You may want to pack a lunch :laugh:

Asimov himself thought otherwise ;P Through his characters, he stated that the redundancy was part of the Frankenstein Complex, the human fear, built up by centuries of stories, that slaves and creations always -- always rebel and seek vengeance on their captors. Since humans can find ways to justify atrocities while still genuinely believing that they did not cause harm, it is reasonable to think that robots, too, could find ways. The in-universe rationale was redundancy, doubling up in an effort to plug a potential loophole, no matter how remote the chance that it could be used. This is also how the Three Laws became so embedded into the design of the positronic brain that it became impossible to create a positronic brain without the Three Laws. In any case, all of your objections -- and my justifications, for that matter -- are irrelevant. Asimov said "I want this for my plot" and it was so. Authors can be pushy like that.

The anthology I, Robot (or better yet, The Complete Robot, which adds several later short stories) should be just a start. By the time Asimov wrote Caves of Steel, he was already seeing the flaws in the Three Laws. By the last Robot novels, Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, he was setting up a way to abandon them completely and segue into the robot-less future he had created with Foundation. If you have the time to read the whole lot (definitely a summer project) it is worth the time.

Chris Quinn wrote:

The only similarity between the book "I, Robot" and the film "I, Robot" is the title

Truth.

According to Asimov, the fear was that a robot could perform an action that does not cause direct harm, but which is harmful anyway at some point in the future. We see this sort of thing far too often in humans: "I just planted the landmines, it is not my fault that you stepped on one." Why should we expect that an artificial life form, engineered to be faster and smarter than humans, would be less creative in justifying its actions?

Asimov (please note spelling) has written a lot about the whys and wherefores of the Three Laws, and his later work explored many of the flaws. For starters, ignore that awful movie. "I, Robot" had very, very little to do with Asimov's work, and Asimov was quite clear, in many different stories, that a forceful accusation of having caused harm would have driven a robot (especially an early, relatively primitive model) into the unbreakable feedback loop called "brainlock." The First Law reflect the fear generated by the Frankenstein Complex, the idea that a human creation that was strong, faster, and much more difficult to disable would take over. The first part, "A robot may not injure a human being," prevents overt actions, such as a robot shooting a person, pushing her off a cliff, crashing the plane it is flying into the side of a building, etc. The second part, "... or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" prevents it from engaging in an action that, itself, does not cause harm but which could lead to harm: for example, setting an inhabited building on fire, dropping a boulder on someone, and so on (these are actions where humans are not directly harmed, where the robot could save them, but is under no obligation to do so.) In the later Robot novels (Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire), Asimov recognized the First Law's flaws, and used those as a way of merging the Robots into the much later, robot-less Foundation stories. The principle flaw is, How do you define "harm"? A human who goes hang-gliding or mountain biking or surfing could come to harm, so the First Law compels robots to dissuade humans from such activities. Driving cars and flying planes can be dangerous, so best to let robots handle that. And more: is an actor harmed by bad reviews? Authors? Artists? Perhaps it would be best if creativity were discouraged. Eventually, the Spacers (the first wave of humans to colonize other star systems, who brought robots with them) became so dependent on robots that their culture stagnated and people became more like pets than masters. This led the two robots in the later novels, R. Giskard and R. Daneel Olivaw, to conceive of the Zeroeth Law: "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." The other three laws became amended to include the condition, "except where such would conflict with the Zeroeth Law." When the two put a plan into action that would force the humans of Earth to begin a second wave of robot-fr

Interesting, I'll give that one some thought.

Solargraphy Analemmas[^] This picture uses a technique called solargraphy. It is a rather old method using a pinhole camera and slow reacting photographic paper: this allows the photographer to record the motion of the sun. This particular image was made by taking three one-minute exposures every day for a year, resulting in an analemma[^] at mid-morning, noon and mid-afternoon.

What Jimmy said. Even Paypal charges less.

It looks like Paypal is not going to be an option: because of recent changes in US tax law, Paypal now requires that donation accounts can ONLY be opened by legally chartered non-profit corporations. This puts the group I'm working with in a bind: they want to raise money so they can go through the legal hassles of incorporating as a non-profit, but they are not allowed to raise money (through Paypal, at least) because they are not incorporated. I believe the phrase is Catch-22. The work-around seems to be setting up a merchant account, but that apparently requires having a verifiable business. So... alternatives?

That's what I was thinking, but my contract contact asked me to shop around a bit.

I'm putting together a website for a not-for-profit group that would like to solicit donations; that has sent me on a quest to find a reliable provider that does not gouge or extort. Paypal is the standard, but they have high fees and a reputation for being unreliable and freezing accounts on seeming whims. So, I am soliciting recommendations for companies in the US that provide such services. Their eventual plan is to solicit donations and, at certain levels, provide premiums (bumperstickers, that sort of thing.) An API would be nice, but I'll settle for reasonably good documentation and ease of use. Are there any you would recommend, or should I just go with Paypal?

Then ponder the 23 Enigma[^].

Earth's terminator, to be exact, and not so much a picture as a movie: Equinox on a Spinning Earth[^] is a short (15 second) movie taken from a year's worth of satellite images aligned so the planet looks immobile. This gives a view of how the terminator -- the boundary between night and day -- moves from one autumn equinox to the next. And just in time for the spring equinox tomorrow! (Or today, depending on where you are on the planet.) (Corrected information.) (Corrected the correction.)

One of the things that astonishes me, looking at pictures like this, is seeing all of the other galaxies in the background. "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."