I agree that the distribution of the benefits of progress is a big problem, but consider also the distribution of losses. By its very nature, technological progress tends to cut low-skilled jobs, because those are the easiest to automate. In general, when progress happens it means we as a society have to become more educated just to get on the bottom of the employment ladder. If anything, the distribution of benefits should be generously apportioned towards creating and extending free education up to graduate level at least. When driver-less cars come into widespread usage, there will be some replacement of lost jobs with other ones: maintenance of driver-less cars, design and production of apps/entertainment systems for driver-less cars, etc. Those are all skilled labour positions. However, there's one thing that doesn't require any skill. Owning a car. And owning a driver-less car allows a single taxi operator to run multiple vehicles. Sure it requires a capital investment, but the point is, it doesn't remove the income stream entirely, in fact, it might even allow more income if handled correctly.

Scala lacks the webby web-web street cred that this list is laden with. Haskell is mentioned briefly in the article, but not considered worthy of Knowing. Meanwhile, Erlang is popular in certain buzzword compliance requirements considered key to trends in web development as of a year or two ago.

... which means that higher maths is really domain specific, and not necessary for programming. Otherwise I could say the accounting or biochemistry were necessary to learn to program, if that's the field I started out in learning to program

Nice catch, Captain Obvious. That was my point!

...is that really a property of Javascript, though, or just your computer? Do the ECMA standards prescribe memory or reference size limits?

...And somehow, HTML is both on the list and lower than Java. Anyone got any theories?

I believe you'll find it's spelled "navel vassal."

My mistake; the original text merely said "thousands." See ctheme's comment.

That's the one! I would've posted the source but I'd only seen it as an image and didn't remember what to search for. Thanks.

There's this story about an off-duty bridge officer aboard a large US military ship who, groggy after having to get up rather early, called the bridge and requested that the vehicle, some quarter of a million tons of steel, personnel and equipment, be rotated 15 degrees, all so he didn't have to move an inch to get the sun out of his eyes while he drank his coffee.

Maybe whoever wrote that list merely wants to read the Linux Journal forums. Surely we're not pretending as if SELinux doesn't exist and that the NSA hasn't historically contributed to Linux. That would be a foolish thing to do. Of foolishness.

Figure skating just hasn't developed far enough yet—throw in a few mocap suits and compare the recorded data to an ideal performance. Root mean standard deviation == your score. Simple!

Pfft! We can still be disappointed.

You and me both. Let's spread the tag !nuclearpulsepropulsion to show our dismay!