tonysidaway

Let's be clear about what a virus is: it's a little bag full of DNA that contrives to be ingested or otherwise taken inside a living being such as a bacterium or a more complex creature. When the bag breaks open the DNA spills out and finds its way into the reproductive process of the host, programming it to produce more of the virus DNA, often at great cost to its host. Computer viruses act in a similar way so the analogy implied by their name is apt. So no, we're not viruses. We tend to get very concerned about what is happening or may happen to our living environment as a result of our actions, but that doesn't mean we're viruses. We're beginning to have quite a large effect on that environment, and this in turn may affect our living conditions and possibly, our long term survival since we're at the top of the food chain. Oh yes, top of the food chain. Now I know what we are: we're the apex predators. http://en.wikipedia....i/Apex_predator We've become so successful and we're so resourceful that we're fast eliminating natural predators and other pressures that keep the population in check. While there is a good argument that our population growth may peak during the next decades and then begin a decline, this isn't known for certain (I myself am very skeptical). But even if we do reach a peak in population, we have to come to terms with the fact that our existence is changing our environment at a fairly rapid rate. This why some geologists have begun to refer to the current geological period as the Anthropocene: http://en.wikipedia....ki/Anthropocene

The term "philosophy" is often used in a rather vague way, but a philosopher is someone who studies knowledge--that is, her subject is not the acquisition of knowledge, but the study of knowledge as a topic. So one of the first modern philosophers, Rene Descartes, asked "how do I know I exist?" Gottfried Leibniz tackled the concept of God as the necessary being, and also asked in his Theodicy, if God is omnipotent and benevolent, why do evil things happen? Both were trying to construct, from fairly basic assumptions such as the reliability of human reason, a system of knowledge. One lasting legacy that philosophy has given us--whatever you think of the likes of Leibniz and Descartes--is the ability to think clearly about thought.

Last year Stanford University offered three free online undergraduate level courses: in artificial intelligence, machine learning and database programming. Out of that very successful venture came two companies specialising in bring university-level education free to anyone who wanted it: Udacity, started by robotics expert Sebastian Thrun who had shared teaching with Peter Norvig on the AI course, and Coursera, founded by Sebastian's Stanford colleagues Andrew Ng (who taught the ML course) and Dapne Koller (who teaches Probabilistic Graphical Models). Between them Udacity and Coursera now offer dozens of high quality online courses all taught by first class academics--the only thing you don't get is a university course credit. The relevance to this forum is the Coursera course in Software as a Service (SaaS), given by Armando Fox and David Patterson. This free course will take you through the fundamentals of web development and cloud computing, the agile development process, the Ruby language, Rails development and testing. If you have some programming background and you want to learn how to develop your own websites, this is a great course taught by acknowledge experts. https://www.coursera.org/course/saas