As an associate professor at the university, I can tell you many students have lost sustained focus, even in very small groups. If an explanation takes longer than 5 minutes, you lose them. If a problem takes longer than 5 minutes to solve, you lose them too. Starting 2 years ago, I modified all my lectures to have like "breakpoints" very often, so that no-one gets lost.

However, I think we already lost the Cartesian approach to breaking problems into smaller tasks. If you give them a rather simple but big problem, very few students are able the break it down and solve each part. Most will just try a global solution for a few minutes, then try the internet for a global solution, and finally get bored and say it's too complicated. One of my hypotheses is that the internet permits to solve most of the problems instantaneously, so you don't need sustained attention anymore. For the few cases where it is needed, well, that's the difference between the elite and the others...

I would not bet a penny on that...

You might be surprised, but a lot of people in France think to go back to 40 hours a week, because they want higher wages whatever the unemployment rate. They don't get that going from 35 to 40 roughly fires 1 in 8 workers (of course it's not exactly true, because people get better wages, and this tends to create jobs - or the company doesn't raise the wages and instead invests in more machines to fire more workers).

I'm pretty sure it would be better for every one to lower this to 32 or 30 hours per week, and it won't have a significant impact on productivity. But the impact on the quality of living would be great.

Forget about miles and think in kilometers. In Europe, we say that 640k should be enough for anybody.

I would also have chosen the BY-NC-ND package even if I don't care about the NC aspect just because it is the only one to have the ND claim. This one is fundamental for a research paper.

If you take into account the time spent to write a good paper, every single word has been carefully crafted for hours. The idea to allow paraphrase or remixes is at best non-sense, most of the time it's just a very bad idea.

I'm pretty sure the authors in the study choose ND, and what ever the remaining condition, because as a researcher, there is just no way I could allow you to make me say something I was not meaning to say in the first place.

How far all thess jokes will go until we decide collectively for a stop, and just throw all those IP crap out the window?

I mean, seriously?

Bill, is that you?

Everything can be automated, it's just a question of time. Let's face it, we are just big and complex automatas, and as our knowledge expands, we are more and more able to mimic ourselves with artificial processes.

That leaves what is not desired to be automated. I'm not sure that's a lot of things. How much of "handmade" is just put by hand into the machine, only to be minimally "customized" by hand? Most people won't see any difference. You can find Kandinsky generators that are as interesting as the original (I'm pretty sure Gerhard Richter is a bot), there was even a Bach cantatas generator that was pretty impressive. Seriously, most of the case, the origin doesn't matter. Except when your kid gives you an ugly painting, you just prefer optimized things, and machines will sooner or later be better at optimizing everything than us.

On the other side, we just love to automate things, because we are lazy. That means, most of us won't bother to do things by hand if it's possible to automoate it (like this recent story on /. about the guy who outsourced his own job).

The question stands still: what will we do for a living after everything's been automated? We have to find an answer in a short time, cause automation is like any other growth, it's exponential.

Or supertasty...

Yummy!

Worst than that! Most of the time you have to pay an extra fee if the paper exceeds the limit set by the journal, and most publisher try to re-organize your paper (enlarge the figures for example) to get you beyond the limit.

And I'm not even talking about the extra fee if you have figures in color...

The problem with very talented programers, is that only very talented programers can easily understand their code. I understand it can be problematic in corprate environment when the next Junior comes in and gets totally lost.

But on the other hand, I guess these guys (The guy from TFA and Carmack) write far better code (performances wise, maintenance wise, etc), than most of the people at any standard IT company.

At my job (I'm associate professor at a French university), I got to sse a lot of programming styles. From my experience, it seems these kind of coding gurus tend to write code that bugs less often, and manage to maintain code of other gurus far better than non-gurus do with non-gurus code. It seems they are in a sort of tight cluster where they do communicate very well with themselves, while the rest of the programmers have high difficulties to communicate, whatever the number of redundant comments they write.

This is a manifestation of what I often call the "Elric Syndrome" after the saga by M. Moorcock. It's the obsession to solve a problem with the use of tools whereas the solution lies in oneself.

You can find it in almost every technical regulation policy, like speed regulators on cars or DRMs to name a few. Moorcock made a brilliant demonstration that this behavior is invariably set to fail.

Apparently, He failed to awake on last december 21.

Java will come back to number 1 in a few years thanks to Android...