History is a continuous series of events. While grouping such events in phases, revolutions, periods, epochs or otherwise arbitrary simplifications may be of great help in understanding history, doing so may result in oversimplifications resulting in a display of incompetence.

I think it is very simple to replace service jobs with robots. And this is happening a quite a fast pace.

In my country (Netherlands), nearly all banks have gone entirely online. They are not just "focusing more on the Internet", no, they have just closed nearly all their offices. Paying taxes has been completely automated for the vast majority. Offline retail is having more and more trouble keeping up with online retail (which, in many cases, is handled almost entirely by robots!). It has been ages since I've been in a real shop! Train personnel is being replaced by access gates and security cameras at a rapid pace, even the checkout employees at supermarket are mostly a thing of the past; customers just scan their groceries themselves. In the medium term, we can also expect all transport personnel (taxis, truck drivers) to be replaced and then it's just a matter of not too much time before the entire process from growing food on the land to it ending up in your fridge is handled by robots.

In fact (again, in my country) in the medium and long term, it does not really look like we're transitioning to a service economy at all. We already did that in the 50s to 80s and are now transitioning into the next phase. This can be seen very clearly during the past 30 years: employment in nearly all professions is declining, except for IT, recycling, sales, care, medical care and recreation (those are the main categories used by our national numbers-agency). In other words: apart from some jobs that are on the rise because they're just new, we're quite quickly moving to those jobs that cannot be replaced by robots.

I think this means the service economy will very soon be a thing of the past. Instead, we're moving towards a "care&joy economy", in which most jobs are about the one thing robots cannot do (very well): being humans.

Note that in the long run, employment rates have been pretty constant. I - like you - am not worried that robots will cause major unemployment; no other type of automation has done so in the past. What I am worried about, is that robots will enable further concentration of wealth on a level and at a speed never seen before. This old-fashioned problem, once popularized by one Karl Marx in the time of steam-engines is even now already gaining major traction. Economic and social inequality are increasing rapidly and will continue to do so.

This worries me because, contrary to popular believe, economic and social equality are the best guarantee for economic growth; the healthiest (but not necessarily the biggest) economies are characterized by notably high equality amongst their participants. (Also see http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html)

Robots won't take our jobs. However, their owners will increasingly not (be able to) spend their (ever growing stack of) money in ways that keep the economy up to speed. If we don't solve this problem before it occurs, it will be the end of western society as we know it.

create a complicated maze with out the use of a loop
1. This is not necessarily a maze. It's noise. At best.
2. It's "without", not "with out"
3. There is a loop

Marijuana most certainly helps. Well, it helps me, but with marijuana one thing is for sure: everybody reacts differently to it. So YMMV tremendously.

It typically has two effects. The first is to help focusing, enabling absorbing much more information into your brain than you typically manage. This helps you through the boring parts (think: endless debug sessions or typing that javadoc), the typical project-blockers which are avoided by procrastinating. It also helps thinking on a more abstract level, working on the bigger picture.

The second effect is that it can trigger a certain kind of creativity, coming up with solutions that you'd otherwise simply not have thought of, the kind of solutions that may sometimes pop into your head while taking a shower after a good nights sleeps.

Note that - in my case - it typically does not negatively affect code quality at all; my code is pristine whether I'm stoned or not. (And I'm considered one of the most horribly code-quality nazis by most of my colleagues so I think I can judge on that;-)).

While such effects do occur quite often, you cannot rely on it; sometimes it just does not happen. Another problem is that using recreational drugs in order to achieve a specific outcome other than recreation-thing itself is guaranteed to end in a bad habit that can quite easily develop into a dependence on marijuana, which can be quite difficult to get rid of. Note that in many people marijuana does trigger nasty symptoms such as an irregular hearthbeat, low bloodpressure (fainting), stomach complaints as well as
withdrawal symptoms ranging from not being able to sleep at all to being unimaginable nervous to actual physical symptoms such as sweating profusely. While I no longer am addicted, I have been for several years and it literally took me years to get rid of that. I have found it much easier to quit smoking tobacco than to quit smoking my daily joint. BE CAREFUL.

Therefore I suggest not to use marijuana at all and if you do, do it at most once a week and do it for recreational purposes ONLY. For me, that advice came a bit too late, but I'm absolutely convinced that smoking weed has increased my programming productivity at home tremendously and has helped me come up with some of the best ideas I've ever had, thereby having a hugely positive effect on my professional career as well.

Nevertheless: just don't do it.

Azure (the MS cloud) now supports Linux images. They probably want some attention for that.

Is it just me or is this nothing new? As least my dutch garbage has been used to generate electricity for ages, often using the waste heat from that process for heating. And since garbage processing is a commercial business, obviously they're going to want to use their capacity to the maximum. Since laws in Europe require proper garbage disposal, this is has been booming business in many European countries for quite a while and plants in the Netherlands have been processing garbage from several other European countries since national laws were changed to allow for this back in 2009.

Note that the obvious overcapacity in many countries is the result of way too enthusiastic responses to increased garbage dumping taxes in several countries. For example, the overcapacity in the Netherlands appears to have been created in response to the Germans finally prohibiting garbage dumping. Since Germany has overcapacity itself (and is for example importing garbage from Italy) this overcapacity in the Netherlands and apparently now in Sweden as well results in a lot of attention for importing garbage.

Note that this overcapacity - unfortunately - has another effect, and that's diminished commercial interest in recycling. As long as the furnace is not doing anything, money is lost. Therefore, potentially recyclable material is probably often burned nowadays...

I (professional Java coder since 1998) absolutely agree. Java is hardly human-writable, even if it were only for the import statements. Without the existence of some very good IDEs Java might very well not have been as popular as it is today. But it is.

Is this a problem? Apparently not in practice. Would I rather have a more dense, less IDE-dependent language? Yes. Are such alternatives available and do they come with an enormous ecosystem of supporting libraries? Nope...

Communism is way to organize a state and a society. It does not say anything about how that state should operate on the world market, which is inherently capitalistic. In fact, communism cannot "pass" the border of the single entity that orchestrates it.

Also note that this rare earth production being suspended smell a lot like a planned economy to. And that's about as communist as it gets. So is articifially manipulating prices in general.

Helium is not scarce yet. But it soon will be; 75% of all Helium comes from a handful of gas wells in the US, where the helium content in natural gas is the highest. These are expected to pretty much run out in a decade or so.

Until that happens, helium recycling isn't really economically profitable. That's why. Nevertheless, some recycling initiatives are going on.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/University+Alberta+looks+become+leader+helium+recycling/6937916/story.html

None of the - stupid - 10 reasons mentioned are unique to desktop PCs. Power and possibilities of smaller devices and desktops are converging. While Moore's law still is more or less correct, it is increasingly less the case for my desktop PC. It's simply fast enough. So is my 8 year old P4 for most tasks. At the same time, smartphones become faster at an incredible pace.

Therefore I believe it probably won't take quite that long before even the typical slashdotter won't have a desktop PC anymore. Why would you still have a desktop PC if your phone has more than enough power, storage and (wireless) connectivity? You will have a monitor, sure, and a keyboard and a mouse, but those are not unique to Desktop PCs. In fact the only things that's still missing from the equation is proper ubiquitous wireless video. But we're getting there.

Sent from my Android tablet using a normal keyboard, mouse and monitor.

It's probably just the top of a boring monolith made of some blackish metal. Nothing to see here; move along.

A bathroom. With showers.

One thing you most certainly wouldn't want to do, is to add more noise; it will only make you tired. I'm pretty sure you should be able to fix the problem with proper insulation. In fact, that's the only way to stop sound from coming in. Once it's in, there's basically only one thing you could do to make it less annoying, and that's to improve the acoustics of your rooms. Think things like carpets, acoustic panels, smart furniture placement, removing or covering up reflective surfaces, possibly even bass traps. Goal is to stop standing waves that amplify certain frequencies (the "room modes") and to lower reverberation.

This will get you two things: the sound coming in is amplified less by your rooms and the sound that originates indoors will be much clearer, standing out from the outdoor noise much more. If you are serious about solving this problem, I suggest you have an acoustics expert look at the problem and do some measurements. Often some very simple cheap measures can improve the situation tremendously.)

Slightly relevant TED video claiming that such noise can actually kill you: http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_why_architects_need_to_use_their_ears.html

The reactors were not really exposed to a tsunami. What caused the problem, was basically a loss of external power plus emergency power for just a bit too long, combined with a loss of cooling water and an emergency cooling system that turned out not to be built to spec.

Also note that even though the plant was not really damaged by the earthquake, all kinds of problems were already occuring due to the emergency shutdown but BEFORE the tsunami struck!

Numerous incidents other than a tsunami could cause similar problems. If they're not solved within a few hours, a meltdown is around the corner.

A few months ago my gf went to buy some light bulbs. She called me to ask how many she should get; I said to buy all they had:P We now have about 150 clear 40W and 60W light bulbs laying around. They were much cheaper than replacing 500 euros worth of plastic crystalish armatures and will last for about 5 years. There's simply no proper alternative for crystalish armatures that are built for a light source that's shaped like filament. Yet.

Bullshit laws made up by idiots that probably burn an amount of energy driving to work daily equal to what I need to keep my lights shining for 10 years....