A research student was just by talking to members of our lab, and this is pretty much the argument I made. (And I wasn't making a Java bashing session, I was making a joke, though the two are not mutually exclusive.)

I'm not fond of Java, but it's a perfectly serviceable language and I'm not against writing code in it. I think I'm a little suspicious of the instructional language model, just because my observation has been that for most people it's around language three that they start realizing that learning new programming languages isn't hard and that it's not the language per se that's important. (I really realized this when I heard that Python was being widely adopted. I actively like Python - and I'm really dubious about it being a useful instructional language in a classroom setting. Even though I have run a Python club at times.)

Mm, yes and no.

The U of WA was my home institution - but it was also where my father taught, and I didn't take my degree in CS. Partially because so many people had known me since I was cutting my teeth on the department machines when I was five, partly because I wasn't super keen on the curriculum... and I had other interests as well. But then it was the the mid-nineties, and my fiance wasn't big on following me around the world, and so I acquiesced to my destiny and became backend server girl at Microsoft. (Until I was the right combination of vested and bored that I returned to research. I'm now doing Neurobiology, via Computational Biochemistry, which is less profitable but awfully entertaining.) ...but there were courses I would have taken were not Ada a prerequisite.

*grin* I weirdly managed to completely miss Pascal. Cut my teeth on Fortran* because it was what my father's grad students were using - though I then picked up Modula2, out of a book written in German, which I didn't speak because my father was convinced it was the Next Big Thing and figured if I learned it I could teach him (thanks, Dad). My undergrad institution was all about Ada ridiculously late, though... Picked up C++ at the beginning of my professional life, back in the mid-nineties, though these days I use more Python than anything else. I've written my share of Java. It wasn't horrible, I was more amazed that it kept being kind of subliminally annoying without being downright awful.

* Which keeps still being relevant - okay, I'm in the sciences now - though I often deny knowing it. I think I took it off my resume in '96.

"...turning on a generation of coders."

I'm glad to hear someone finally having the courage to admit this. Especially considering how widely it has been adopted as an instructional language and how many young people were betrayed by their institutions and communities at the very start of their programming careers.

But I'd also like to hear more from the many people who've risen above these challenges and gone on to become developers even so. It may be hard. It may be traumatic. But it's good to remember that it's possible to rise above it.

Not only that, the dough likely came from multiple different stalks of wheat, and the sauce was derived from a number of tomato vines. I'm not sure how any of this is relevant to the quality of the pizza, though.

That's the cynical answer.

The actual reason that EV cars often look strange is because the designers are trying to make them as aerodynamic as possible in order to extend their range.

As battery power density becomes more adequate, maximizing aerodynamic efficiency will become less of a priority, so in the future you can expect designs that make efficiency tradeoffs in order to get a better look.

Raising minimum wage *past a certain point* won't help anyone. If you've ever done basic calculus you will have come across the concept of oprimization - in the abstract for instance, finding where the derivative of a function that's some sort of concave-down curve crosses zero.

The minimum wage will be like that. If you graphed the spending power of the minimum wage people (their income minus their expenses) it will probably be some kind of curve. Starting from zero, the graph will slope upwards, until you hit a peak, and then it will slope downwards as the increased labour cost exceeds the benefit of higher wages.

We are probably somewhere to the left of this optimal point. The increase LA is making probably will move people closer to the optimal point. Increasing the minimum wage to $100/hr will move you to a point far to the right of the point at which the first derivative of the graph crosses zero.

Most farms are highly mechanised and the cost of labour makes up only a tiny part of the cost. (My dad's ex's family are farmers, and farms employ a tiny fraction of the number of people than they did even just 40 years ago).

That assumes 100% of the cost of a product is labour costs.

In reality this is not true. In your example, the wage might go from $60/day to $120/day, but the product will go from $60 before to $80 after. Competition will mean many businesses take lower profits rather than pass on the entire price increase, and virtually no products are 100% labour cost. While wages cannot be raised infinitely, there will be an optimal point, and I suspect we are well below that optimal point as other cities have already demonstrated.

Only if 100% of that product's cost is labour.

In reality this is rarely true, and competition means that businesses often can't pass on all of the cost increase - what it'll mean is businesses will make a little less profit, prices will increase by less than the increase in the minimum wage, and more people will have some sort of disposable income they can now spend on discretionary items. So sales increase.

Certainly you can't raise wages infinitely, and at some point you'll hit a peak, but I suspect we are a long way below that peak.

There's an easy fix for that -- move to India where you can enjoy extremely cheap goods and services.

(or if that doesn't sound like an appealing option to you, ask yourself why it is you find it preferable to live in the USA despite the higher cost of living)

Fiber is amply fast.

The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...

...laura

Sure, in 2015, it wouldn't be so hard for Microsoft to include an SSH client with their OS? I can't think of any other OS that doesn't come with one pre-installed.

Now that it's known to be possible, the drug cartels don't even need to buy or steal the recipe. If necessary, they could just hire some genetic engineers to independently re-discover how to do it.

It seems like there might be a a way to solve this particular problem more cheaply. How much extra safety could be provided without upgrading any track? If we accept (for the sake of this thread) that this was a case of operator error, it seems like that accidents like this could be avoided by installing onto each train a speed governor linked to a GPS receiver and a known-speed-limits database. While that wouldn't handle all the possible issues that PTC would, I doubt that would cost anywhere near as much as upgrading thousands of miles of track. That might be a reasonable safeguard to install in the short term while waiting for a more comprehensive solution to be funded and installed.