More evidence to support my thesis. A power outage on the ground might not prevent an airplane from flying, but it can keep passengers from getting onboard.
 
Just imagine the effect of a widespread power outage on modern society. I've been in Manila during power outages that killed traffic lights across the entire city of 25 million, providing a glimpse of life after the post-zombie apocalypse.
 
 
 

BobF
I'm more worried about the ZA or the collapse of the US dollar/gubment than I am about computers.

Exactly.  Some of us know how to survive with out Technology.  

Getting back to the rise of the machines... there are also the issues that will surround intelligent agents. Granted our exposure so far has been to the likes of siri or google's whatever and alexa, etc. but eventually, everyone could have one or more intelligent agents running at home. Agents on the order of IBM's Watson and many times more powerful.
 
While there would be advantages, like a tutor for the kids or a useful personal assistant, there is also the great potential for harm. It would be possible that the machines (IA) turn against us but perhaps the agents turn against themselves. We are then stuck in the middle of an AI war.
 
I can't help but thinking about the self-driving cars. Given a certain set of circumstances, a self driving car could make the decision that it is your time to die. I'm not saying it would be malicious (not yet anyway) but through the decision tree it might think that driving you off a cliff is preferable to the other scenarios. That kinda haunts me.

ADA =
 
"American Dental Association"(?) ... na.
 
"Americans with Disabilities Act"(?) ... hmmm
 

Linda's great-grandmother?

craigb
Grace Hopper's inspiration.

Hedda's cousin?

BobF

craigb
Grace Hopper's inspiration.

She was a piece of work for sure.

Very common, but business oriented.

I did COBOL from 1977 to about 2010. The last 10 years was with a single client that paid a yearly retainer. In 2010 I did no work at all but was paid. They were bought up by another company and transitioned all IT to corporate.
 

BobF

bapu
MOVE ADA-LOVELACE TO GRACE-HOPPER.

A COBOL guy!
 
I once wrote a COBOL tool to replace standard card decks for a maintenance management system.
 
Does 3M ring a bell, craig?  IMMS?
 

I was a Fortran guy for a couple of years before becoming a COBOL guy.
 
First major bug I created in COBOL was due to a period on the wrong line in a IF statement. Learned that lesson quickly.

If this was a game of COBOL one-upsmanship, I do believe I would win!  'Cause I think I am the ONLY geek in the world who has ever created a fully operational, full-screen editor coded entirely in...  COBOL!!!
 
Despite my many (obvious) objections, I had a programming manager that insisted I write a full-screen editor for our internal users in COBOL where we could allow or disallow certain features (the "real" issue with the DEC EVE and EDT editors we already had).  Yes, I ended up doing it and, yes, it DID work (albeit slow as snot).  No idea why he was so stuck on COBOL, probably THE worst language he could have picked for that task!
 
So many of the other programmers were laughing at my having to do the project that word got up to the VP of IT and, when he walked into one of the Team Leader's offices and saw a code printout of it being used as wallpaper (it WAS very pretty), he investigated and we went with my original suggestion (using EVE with available modifications).
 
I'm still a little glad that he saw it after I had it finished and working though! 
 
That said, I also programmed the fuzzy logic used to sync up cellular call records created by a single call as a user was handed off from tower to tower in COBOL.  There were two main issues:  One, we're talking about MILLIONS of call records (with over 2 BILLION in the Los Angeles area alone - the largest cellular market in the U.S.) and, two, the time stamps on all towers were always a little bit different.

craigb
If this was a game of COBOL one-upsmanship, I do believe I would win!  'Cause I think I am the ONLY geek in the world who has ever created a fully operational, full-screen editor coded entirely in...  COBOL!!!
 
Despite my many (obvious) objections, I had a programming manager that insisted I write a full-screen editor for our internal users in COBOL where we could allow or disallow certain features (the "real" issue with the DEC EVE and EDT editors we already had).  Yes, I ended up doing it and, yes, it DID work (albeit slow as snot).  No idea why he was so stuck on COBOL, probably THE worst language he could have picked for that task!
 
So many of the other programmers were laughing at my having to do the project that word got up to the VP of IT and, when he walked into one of the Team Leader's offices and saw a code printout of it being used as wallpaper (it WAS very pretty), he investigated and we went with my original suggestion (using EVE with available modifications).
 
I'm still a little glad that he saw it after I had it finished and working though! 
 
That said, I also programmed the fuzzy logic used to sync up cellular call records created by a single call as a user was handed off from tower to tower in COBOL.  There were two main issues:  One, we're talking about MILLIONS of call records (with over 2 BILLION in the Los Angeles area alone - the largest cellular market in the U.S.) and, two, the time stamps on all towers were always a little bit different.

Interesting.  I was the director over development of CS and billing apps for a top tier cell company in my last corp gig.
 

I wrote a song once. Does that count?

craigb
Small world in deed!  
 
And I used to work with a Bob (Durgan) at the defense contractor who was also a sub-mariner.  In fact, due to that, is how I learned about sleep cycles which has helped me tremendously over the years.
 
For over seven years I was a consultant to Verizon Wireless (first through Anderson Consulting, who's now Accenture, and then direct).  I did a LOT of work on their billing systems during that time (ending in the conversion of said system to one of their others which was maintained in another state).  I also was both the tech lead and project lead for a couple of their new products (like 1xRTT, the first generation Internet access).

Wow.  A million years ago we adopted and adapted AC's Method 1.  We took a highly modified version of Amdocs system as a baseline and went from there.  I left 11+ years ago when wireless data was just heating up.  I had many, many long nights dealing with conversions for acquired markets.
 
One of the first things I did when I joined that company was to write an interface to the billing system that would perform automated provisioning in the switches.  Six regional CS data systems to 22 switching centers.  IIRC (it was the early 90s), that was my last pure C project.
 
I remember doing some interesting collabs with other carriers.  The coolest was with Docomo Japan.  We shared our CDMA performance calcs with them in exchange for a piece of a small PCS concern we both held minor interest in.  I was running tech support in our NetOps center at the time.
 
I remember building out N CA for an independent partnership.  We had I-5 from Mt Shasta to the OR border, charging $3 + $1/min.  I remember sitting in a switch room in the middle of nowhere at midnight.  15 seconds after the carrier channels went hot, calls started going thru.  Cellular was wild times!!
 
Over on the coast a big quake took out a bunch comms and ****ed up a couple of mountain towns.  I was driving mountain top to mountain top taking radios from one cell to another to build capacity for the first responders, while the sales were handing out cell phones to them gratis.  We got a ton of police and fire contracts after that.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Cape_Mendocino_earthquakes
 
 

No Python fans here then? I learned it a few years ago and was amazed at how quick and easy it is. I found it really intuitive and elegant. As an example, the little app I wrote for my business in C (which basically just extracts info from calendars and uses it to calculate a table of info I use to create my invoices), consists of 3 C files and 2 header files, probably around 250 lines of code in the C files and implements a linked list of linked lists. Tiny? Yes. But consider that when I went back and rewrote it in Python as an experiment, it was something like 25 lines of code in total. For just getting something simple up and running in a hurry, nothing beats it!
 

sharke
No Python fans here then? I learned it a few years ago and was amazed at how quick and easy it is. I found it really intuitive and elegant. As an example, the little app I wrote for my business in C (which basically just extracts info from calendars and uses it to calculate a table of info I use to create my invoices), consists of 3 C files and 2 header files, probably around 250 lines of code in the C files and implements a linked list of linked lists. Tiny? Yes. But consider that when I went back and rewrote it in Python as an experiment, it was something like 25 lines of code in total. For just getting something simple up and running in a hurry, nothing beats it!
 

My ex-roommate had to take Python as a course requirement.  He doesn't like programming at all so I helped him with his assignments (which I thought were fun much to his annoyance).  I had never seen the language before and, obviously, didn't go to the classes, but using a few minutes to browse his reference book (and knowing what to look for) I was able to help him code his way to an "A" in that class.  So I'd have to agree with you that it's a pretty darn easy and elegant language!
 
It sure beats trying to keep track of things like C++'s triple dereferenced pointers!  (***example)
 
I'm just about to upgrade to Visual Studio 2016, I wonder if it has native support for Python...