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Submission + - The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Researchers warn that a glut of code is coming that will depress wages and turn coders into Uber drivers, InfoWorld reports. 'The researchers — Boston University's Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Guillermo LaGarda, and Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs — aren't predicting some silly, Terminator-like robot apocalypse. What they are saying is that our economy is entering a new type of boom-and-bust cycle that accelerates the production of new products and new code so rapidly that supply outstrips demand. The solution to that shortage will be to figure out how not to need those hard-to-find human experts. In fact, it's already happening in some areas.'

Submission + - Is Spacetime Countable--And Why It Matters?

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the big problems with quantum gravity is that it generates infinities that are hard to deal with mathematically.They come about because quantum mechanics implies that accurate measurements of the universe on tiny scales require high-energy. But when the scale becomes very small, the energy density associated with a measurement is so great that it should lead to the formation of a black hole, which would paradoxically ruin the measurement that created it. So physicists have invented a technique called renormalisation to get rid of the infinities. They assume there is a minimum scale beyond which nothing can be smaller, the so-called Planck scale. This limit ensures that energy densities never become high enough to create black holes. This is equivalent to saying that space-time is not infinitely divisible. Instead it must be discrete, or as a mathematician might put it, countable. In other words, it is possible to allocate a number to each discrete volume of space-time making it countable, like grains of sand on a beach or atoms in the universe. Many physicists are uncomfortable with this ideas and now they may have an alternative. A small group of cosmologists are developing a new theory of gravity, called shape dynamics, in which spacetime is infinitely divisible and so uncountable . This ignores many ordinary features of physical objects, such as their position within the universe. Instead, it focuses on objects’ relationships to each other, such as the angles between them and the shape that this makes (hence the term shape dynamics). These angles and shapes are scale invariant--they are the same whatever scale you look at them. And that's why spacetime in this model is infinitely divisible. It's early days for shape dynamics but a growing number of theorists have high hopes for the theory following a recent proof that special relativity is its mathematical equivalent.

Comment Re:Once more (Score 1) 100

by Petr Kočmíd (#48891557) Attached to: U.S. Gas Stations Vulnerable To Internet Attacks

I'm just irritated that someone somewhere thought it was necessary to say TCP/IP card as opposed to network card.

You don't need to be irritated. There are plenty of embedded network serial interfaces which have actually TCP/IP protocol hardwired in hardware, such as Wiznet W5100 or newer. You can find some on Arduino shields. These are not generic network adapters, as you know them. Fine tools for hacking, though.

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