We might see a great deal of improvement, particularly for the underachieving ones.

Sure, it's a little costlier than a full blown slave at a Chinese Apple phone factory, but be assured, it's only a temporary setback until we can get indentured servitude for student loan defaults back on the books.

It works because it forces developers meet regularly, track progress, discuss problems, pay attention to requirements, be aware of the schedule and what everyone else is doing, The rest is theology, more or less.

By making drugs illegal, they become expensive and create a pool of dark money which can then be rerouted to:

1) Banks ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... )
2) Federal agencies and lobbyists ( http://www.thenation.com/artic... )
3) Three letter agencies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... )
4) Local police ( http://my.chicagotribune.com/#... ) where traffic stops are now an entrepreneurial opportunity, as in "I had a thought about drugs, so give me all of your money."

If your C++ code is not good enough or Java code is painfully slow, it's not because the technology is bad - it's because you haven't learned how to use it right. That way, you won't be satisfied with Rust either, but just for some other reasons."

Gods, I wish we could force EVERY programmer to take some basic neurophysiology and at least one human factors course.

If the language is hard to use and makes it easy to make mistakes, the language design is wrong. NOT the humans. The humans, by definition *can't* be wrong. A language is like any other machine. In this case, it's purpose is to provide a highly granular interface to the system FOR HUMANS.

Machines, any machine, exist for exactly, and only one reason, to serve humans efficiently (i.e to reduce human physical and cognitive labor to a minimum while allowing them to accomplish their goals).

If a language accomplishes that, the language is well designed. If it doesn't do that due to obfuscated syntax, a lack of safety checks, over-engineering (It does so much) and under-design (What it does is almost impossible to understand and use), then the language is badly designed, and the language designers, incompetent, because they neglected to consider the human part of the system in their design.

And now there's some nut crazy chasing me trying to kill me. Fucking mother's day.

That's the market. It's shrinking. People are lazy and stupid. They want big brother to take care of things for them. It will never disappear, however, I can't discount the possibility that such applications may one day be made illegal.

Hire older developers, or even competent developers? That's a problem for the help. They're told to buy the cheapest labor by clueless MBAs and do their best.

Why? MBAs are idiots with degrees and high salaries. The worst kind. If it doesn't exist on a spreadsheet, and doesn't look like it'll get them next quarter's bonus, they simply don't care. Actual product development and sales mean nothing to these guys. They're looking to do something that *looks* impressive, wait for the inevitable every 18 month re-org, collect their money and leave the mess for the next guy to clean up. The next MBA fool makes it look like he's cleaning up and becomes a hero, and then gets his bonus. Win-win, from a management standpoint.

Welcome to America!

That's my suggestion. Biosphere 1 and 2 were both failures. We don't know enough to make sustainable closed biospheres work on Earth, much less in orbit or on Mars. When we have something that lasts 10 years, we might be on to something. Until then, practice, practice, practice... Baby steps. How about an L5 or two to start.

This law will somehow be magically passed. Congressmen will be bribed, blackmailed or both to make it happen. The transnational wealthy want it to happen, so it will and their little servants in congress will be brought to heel, one way or another.

They seem to be all over the map, in good ways and bad. Geniuses who can't ever seem to finish a project. Good, solid, mediocre developers who churn out working, but unspectacular code year after year. Quite frankly, I prefer the latter. They can make you profitable. Eccentric geniuses? Not so much, and quite frankly, not worth the effort. If you feel it necessary to write a compiler in assembler, more power to you, but do it on your own time. It has no impact on our mundane, memory-inefficient, but maintainable C# apps.

'Low-head nondestructive hydroelectric power' isn't enough energy to provide a significant amount of power unless you're looking at powering a tiny village.

True, at the current scale. I think what all this points to is that we need better energy storage technology. Chemical storage is currently the most efficient (i.e. petroleum fuel), but in the long run, what's needed is better battery technology - something equivalent in energy density and price to petroleum. It's a tall order, but at least there's some progress.

The downside, of course, is that this isn't likely to happen soon enough to provide enough cheap power to run a global "just-in-time" supply chain. Transportation energy is the major problem, or at least it is if you don't want a lot of people to starve.

Not to mention special ops, infantry combat, mining and ditch digging. These professions are all mostly male. I guess we'd better go figure out how to get more women there too.

Equality doesn't mean you just get to do the nice, clean, fun stuff. It means you do *all* the stuff.

No, you've moved from "displacing farmland" to "destroying an ecology you don't care about because you don't live there." As someone who's been to Death Valley and lived in New Mexico, I can tell you that the "deserts" are rather delicate, unique ecosystems.

Look, there are just better ways to get industrial scale energy than by harvesting biomass. There's quite a bit of sunlight. There's thorium. There's conservation and efficiency. There's low-head, nondestructive hydroelectric power (no dams required). There's geoengineering to bring heat to the surface - lousy for generating power, but great for temperature control.

And all of these work with minimal ecological impact.

These are always the questions when talking about new energy sources.

Gasoline currently has 114,000 BTUs per gallon, at about $2.33 a gallon at my local station. It's being produced from source materials that don't require farmland, or blocking sunlight to local ecologies. It's stable at room temperature and portable.

While biodiesel typically comes in at 118,300 BTUs per gallon, and may be cheap to make *today,* if we were to try and scale up to current industrial scale use, the price would climb remarkably (and quickly) and the resources needed to make it (i.e. farmland, water and sunlight) would soon push up food prices as more and more land was diverted to energy production.

Biofuels have a place in the energy picture. It's just never going to be a very big one. What we need are batteries that are worth a shit (i.e. cheap and with about 20x current energy densities) and a mix of solar/nuclear/low head hydro/wind and so on.