Anything that can be automated will be. An awful lot of programmers are already doing nothing more than running macros and "smart commands" with IDEs like Eclipse to produce the bulk of their code. Given a sufficiently detailed application model and an appropriate rule engine, the need for that "skillset" becomes obsolete.

Eventually only the highest level functions will need to be coded "by hand", themselves driven by the application models instead of class and structure definitions.

Throughout my career as a programmer and even after I retired, programming has consistently and constantly evolved to higher and higher levels of abstraction. It's only a matter of time, effort, and the question of who will be first to market.

But it will happen.

Yeah, he conned a bunch of uneducated, down-on-their-luck grunts into abandoning their personal sense of decency and agreeing to kill thousands of people - not because their religious convictions told them it was the right thing to do, but because ... they just couldn't find work?

That must have been the case with "grunts" like Mohamed Atta, right? Totally uneducated. Well, except for going to college to study architecture, and spending time at the Technical University of Hamburg. You know where he met with other poor grunts who could only afford to do things like fly back and forth between Germany and various middle eastern destinations, spend time training in Afghanistan, and so on. He traveled to Spain for some meetings, then - the poor, uneducated, desperate guy! - flew to Maryland, where he met up with fellow grunt Hani Hanjour, then off to other destinations where the fellow grunts were living in various states of perfectly comfortable. They didn't just round up some scruffy guys from some poverty-stricken village in the desert and talk them into this because they had no options. These were people who were dedicated to the world view preached by Bin Laden and their intellectual fellows in the Taliban. Focusing on the leaders IS important, because it's what they say and stand for that thousands and thousands of their compatriots - including those living comfortably in western nations, where they've been educated and employed - find agreeable enough to follow.

This whole notion that the guys running, say, the media production facilities, newsletter operations, and logistics for groups like ISIS as they line up insufficiently hardline Muslims and of course western hostages out of whom they can't squeeze enough cash, and lop off their heads or burn them alive ... that the guys doing that are doing so because they're not happy with the local employment prospects ... that would be really funny if it weren't so dark and just plain evil. Not enough schools? Of course not! These are the people who are dragging the teachers out into the street and shooting them in the head before they burn down the schools. The problem isn't lack of foreign investment, it's cultural rot in the form of their local religion crashing headlong into the rest of the world's more contemporary ways of life. These guys don't want modern jobs, they want medieval jobs.

If this were late December, this would be an article about the physics of Santa Claus having to travel to so many households per second that he'd be essentially a ball of flaming plasma. Which is to say, a singularly pointless thought experiment. But apparently it's not singular. We've gone past the pointlessness singularity. Paging Mr. Kurzweil!

I'm pretty sure any power-line noise from a memory card is dwarfed by the poor sound quality of the chip amps used on most portable audio devices.

As to non-portable devices, the noise of case and laptop fans and even the chirp of hard drives seeking drown out any "feedback noise" I get even from the chip amps used in my computers to drive the speakers. While I do spring for low-dB fans whenever I'm replacing them, they still produce an emphatic whoosh in the background no matter how good they are.

Whan I want to really listen to music, I far prefer my Sony noise-cancelling ear-cup headphones to using speakers. Ambient noise in this place is just too high to really enjoy music any other way. And I suspect the same is true of most homes that don't have dedicated sound rooms with thousands of dollars invested in baffling, damping, and so forth.

Most high-end apartments and office buildings (the sort of places where you'd find enough clients to make this sort of delivery interesting) don't have their rooftops (or, their entire rooftops) open to the public. Otherwise you'd have the public messing with their HVAC, dishes, and everything else). And it should be trivial, using bluetooth or another close proximity protocol, to have the drone ring the doorbell with a pre-assigned key. I can see this being useful for document tubes being delivered (instead of having a guy on a bicycle race through the ground traffic doing the usual gotta-have-this-delivered-RIGHT-NOW courier thing), and other specialty tasks.

The thinking is that a truck could roll into a defined area with, say, a dozen small packages to deliver, and have drones fan out to several places at once (presumably, destinations that routinely take such deliveries, and are well suited to it). That's a driver/truck magnifier.

I can see some businesses installing what amounts to a drone delivery doggie-door/coal-chute on their roof tops, possibly with coded locks, that allow stuff to be dropped off with a straight shot down to a mail room or catch bin in a loading dock area. If you have a dozen business tenants in a small building like that, you know that Amazon (for example) is going to be delivering small boxes with things like phones, batteries, disk drives, ink carts, etc., on a daily basis.

If you redefine terms on the fly, you can make any argument you want to.

My point was and is that database IO blocking is the issue for at least 90% of real front-line business applications, regardless of whether they are serving internal or external customers. Client-side joins of such data are extremely rare -- there are remote database options for doing that far more efficiently and effectively provided by every major database vendor out there.

If you're doing client-side joins, you aren't using your tools very effectively, and should be fired.

I fail to see the benefit of "non-blocking IO" when it is database concurrency that is the issue for most applications that are used to update information. So what if your first fragment of HTML can be shipped back to the client before you finish processing the page? If your servlets are taking so long to run that network IO blockages are "important to performance", you have some serious problems with your application logic.

Excellent! So, now we can have a core group of smart, hard working people, and they can be slaves to the completely uneducated leisure class. That's going to be super-duper successful, and will definitely inspire more people to study hard.

It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from ... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.

Closely followed by Java.

I mean, seriously -- how *else* are you supposed to transfer control of your browser to a nefarious third party?

Flash.

:P :P :P

I'll be happy to let you scan my computer -- if you show up with a warrant authorizing you to do so. I have nothing to hide; that doesn't mean I'm going to broadcast it and make it easy pickings for your fishing expeditions.

The public is not driving a "demand" for law enforcement to have a way past people's strong encryption. They're driving a navel-gazing demand that everyone else's strong encryption be breakable, but not theirs.

Worse, law enforcement is ignoring the fact that they're supposed to get warrants to access people's information, and are bitching to high hell that people are taking steps to stop their illegal snooping.

Too bad, fuzzballs. You, the NSA, CSEC, GCHQ, and everyone else who thinks their "need" to spy is greater than my need for information security can take a spin on a sharp pole.

The inverse is also true. You have many, many, MANY cases of people being charged with being "impaired" because of metabolites when they weren't at all high. In fact, given the state of current "tests" for "cannabis impairment", I'd say most cases of "impairment" were no such thing.