ArbitraryLimits

No, just limit your popular science reading to books written by scientists instead of journalists.

> I didn't know how to learn.

I'm not trolling here, but don't you think it's more accurate to say you didn't know how to work?

> The applications being developed will be at least as transformative as anything the automobile delivered.

Are you serious? I'm having a hard time seeing a disruptive innovation in CV anywhere.

> so older Mac programmers are no strangers to this sort of stuff.

And embedded software programmers. There is still a market for chips that don't consume more power than an electric blanket.

"A professor's job is to profess - often wrong, but never in doubt."

Keep an eye on your precious bodily fluids. They're the first thing to go.

Nothing in the GP post says anything about the rosiness of life inside the system.

> when it makes both ethical and financial sense.

It saves money on a small scale because no one's trying to defraud it yet.

SAP is a space now? I thought it was a company.

I always thought this was the strongest technical argument against Star Wars back in the 80s - all you have to do to defeat a sattelite-based system of any kind is launch a load of gravel into orbit and wait a few days.

I grew up in Minnesota and moved to southern California as an adult, and after listening very hard for any trace of an accent out here, the only thing I've noticed is that Caucasians who grew up here and went to AP english classes enunciate their T's very clearly. It's kind of weird because that kind of kid in the upper Midwest is very careful to turn the T into a glottal stop, to fit in with everyone else.

Well, thanks.

Is he similarly well-qualified to dismiss an entire profession?

Do kids not learn this in 8th grade any more? I'm seriously not trying to be snarky, I just can't think of a way to write that question that sounds unsnarky. I thought everyone learned about the polar representation of complex numbers.

> so many US companies deal with at least Spanish that you'd think more companies would be prepared to deal with this

Actually it's the opposite - inside the US, Spanish-speaking markets are mostly served by companies that only serve those markets and not the English speaking ones.

The reason the US always ranks at the bottom of standardized test scores has nothing to do with how our education system works and everything to do with who it educates.

In virtually every other industrialized country, students are split into two educational tracks, one vocational and one for "real education" which roughly corresponds to the split in the US between kids who go to college and those who don't.

Standardized tests (like the ones whose scores are reported on here) are only given to the kids on the "real educational" track in other countries, while in the US they're given to everyone, and the inevitable result is that scores from the US take a big hit because of the non-college bound kids.

Once in a while you see a report where someone filters the test results for only honors or AP students in the United States before comparison, and in these comparisons US scores are pretty much the same as other industrialized countries.

My impression of Java, as someone who ends up having to use it every few years when I can't get out of it, is that the cumulative effect of generics and autoboxing can really change the feel of the language, but only if you use them, of course.

Also, I thought real closures were introduced in 1.7? That seems like a big change to me.

Re: C# I was mostly referring to annotations for reflection. If they ever wanted to add first class getter/setter methods that would be cool, too.

The reason Hotmail has stagnated under Microsoft is because of the programmers, not the management. Since there aren't any interesting technical problems in it, none of the hot shot programmers want to work on it. I'm positive that inside Microsoft the view is that Hotmail is something a clueless manager saddled some unlucky programmers with.

How "obviously not?" All three languages have changed significantly since 2000. I took a good look at C++'s TR11 just last week and was amazed at how much stuff is in it. Java's gotten generics, real inner classes, all the good stuff they've ripped off from C#...It seems to me like the article is spot on, unless you interpreted "at a turning point" to mean "about to go away."

Um, you don't have to have people currently living die. Even if you found 5-6 billion people to sign up to die tomorrow, what would you do with their bodies? How would you provide for their children, if any? Would you allow parents to sign up their whole families? etc. etc. I'm pretty sure the GP was just talking about capping reproduction for a while.

Leonard Adleman's recollection of being the film's "mathematical consultant" is also interesting:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm

> one of several business services

Could elaborate on the other ones?

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Well, if we're striving for technical correctness, std::list really works by invoking the assingment operator on the items. The original article is strictly correct when it says:

> EDIT: Assume that the object to be contained in the list is non-Assignable as is the case with any non-trivial objects, for example those holding large memory buffers, file descriptors, handles etc. If the object is Assignable simple std::list<person> would do and there is no problem.

Except that normal C++ programmers would deal with that by overriding the assigment operator on this class to copy buffer pointers or whatever as appropriate.

It kind of freaks me out that Chuck Yeager has a a twitter account.

The good in the post is obvious, someone has to stand up for taking out the bad parts too.

It's not 1994, no one "points" a browser at anything any more.

It's almost as if they were more interested in having a conversation than in looking up trivia...

They're not making money on "computers" meaning desktop machines, they're making it on mobile devices.

> except perhaps price

It's almost as if all computers were sufficiently powerful for 99% of use cases that that's the only thing most people care about...