Comment Awesome post (Score 3, Insightful) 117
OK--this is probably the stupidest and worst-informed
Is Technology Eroding Employment? 544
First time accepted submitter Idontpostmuch writes "The idea that technology cannot cause unemployment has long been taken as a simple fact of economics. Lately, some economists have been changing their tune. MIT research scientist Andrew Mcaffee writes, 'As computers and robots get more and more powerful while simultaneously getting cheaper and more widespread this phenomenon spreads, to the point where economically rational employers prefer buying more technology over hiring more workers. In other words, they prefer capital over labor. This preference affects both wages and job volumes. And the situation will only accelerate as robots and computers learn to do more and more, and to take over jobs that we currently think of not as "routine," but as requiring a lot of skill and/or education.'" Note: Certainly not all economists agree "that technology cannot cause unemployment," especially in the short term. From a certain perspective, displacing labor is a, if not the, central advantage of technology in general.
Comment Fail (Score 0, Troll) 305
This, too, will fail.
Comment Re:Missing: Intelligent placement of figures, etc. (Score 1) 196
I should have mentioned that the word processor that placed graphics intelligently was Fullwrite Professional.
Comment Missing: Intelligent placement of figures, etc. (Score 1) 196
What did my word processor get wrong? I have tried and/or used virtually every word processor currently available for the Macintosh and except for LyX, they all lack the ability to intelligently place stand-alone objects such as graphics, figures, tables, sidebars, etc. Except for LyX, they _all_ treat these objects as giant characters. (Please don't tell me about anchor points etc.—they don't solve the problem.) This was astonishing to me when I discovered this about a year ago as I prepared to do a major piece of technical writing. Not even the vaunted Microsoft Word can do this. My astonishment is due in part because from about 1988 to 1998 there was a word processor for the Mac that did this with aplomb.
Second on my "missing" list is built-in equation editor. Again, LyX handles equations natively, not as an afterthought or as a third-party kludge.
US Air Force Scraps ERP Project After $1 Billion Spent 362
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending $1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain. Dubbed the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), the project has racked up $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, 'and has not yielded any significant military capability,' an Air Force spokesman said in a statement. 'We estimate it would require an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Therefore, we are canceling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements.'"
Comment N = 2. Great. Let's write it up and send it in. (Score 1) 206
N = 2. Great. Let's write it up and send it in.
Comment Tomacco! (Score 1) 287
Finally— tomacco! Do'h!
Nuclear Powered LEDs For Space Farming 287
DevotedSkeptic writes with an interesting article on possible lighting sources for growing food on the moon and other off-world locations. From the article: "... Agriculture remains the key to living and working off-world. All the mineral ore in the solar system can't replace the fact that for extended periods on the Moon or Mars, future off-worlders will need bio-regenerative systems in order to prosper. Here on earth, researchers still debate how best to make those possible, but nuclear-powered state of the art LED technology is arguably what will drive photosynthesis so necessary to provide both food and oxygen for future lunar colonists. ... Although during the two weeks that make up the long lunar day astronauts might be able to funnel refracted sunlight into covered greenhouses or subsurface lava tunnels, they will be left without a light source during the long lunar night. Current solar-powered battery storage technology isn't adequate to sustain artificial light sources for two weeks at the time. Thus, the most practical solution is simply to use some sort of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, not unlike the one powering the current Mars Science lab, to power the LEDs that will spur photosynthesis in lunar greenhouses. ... On earth, Mitchell says it takes roughly 50 square meters of agriculture to provide both food and oxygen life to support one human. But, as he points out, who can say how productive plants are ultimately going to be on the moon, in gravity that is only one sixth that of earth?"
Bad Software Runs the World 349
whitroth tips a story at The Atlantic by James Kwak, who bemoans the poor quality of software underpinning so many important industries. He points out that while user-facing software is often well-polished, the code running supply chains, production lines, and financial markets is rarely so refined. From the article:
"The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good. Writing good software is hard. There are thousands of opportunities to make mistakes. More importantly, it's difficult if not impossible to anticipate all the situations that a software program will be faced with, especially when — as was the case for both UBS and Knight — it is interacting with other software programs that are not under your control. It's difficult to test software properly if you don't know all the use cases that it's going to have to support. There are solutions to these problems, but they are neither easy nor cheap. You need to start with very good, very motivated developers. You need to have development processes that are oriented toward quality, not some arbitrary measure of output."
Comment How does this compare to Quartz in OS X? (Score 1) 563
As far as I know, OS X has used the GPU to render everything for several years. So how does Windows 8 compare? Is this another example of Windows playing catch-up?
Comment The Speed of Sound is not 700 mph (Score 4, Informative) 155
From TFA: "Thirty seconds after leaping, he’ll exceed the speed of sound in the thin upper atmosphere by traveling almost 700 miles per hour."
The speed of of sound in the upper atmosphere is _not_ 700 miles per hour. That figure relates to the speed of sound at one atmosphere and normal temperatures and also has to consider partial pressures including water vapor. In the upper atmosphere, the speed of sound is much less.
Claims similar to this over the years that the space shuttle is traveling at Mach 25 are just as ill-informed, since the "mach" number is supposed to be based on local conditions, not at some hypothetical place on a beach (one atmosphere, nice temperatures). It is wrong to simply divide some velocity by the speed of sound at sea level and then apply it to conditions present at the object's location.
Van Rossum: Python Not Too Slow 510
snydeq writes "Python creator Guido van Rossum discusses the prospects and criticisms of Python, noting that critics of Python performance should supplement with C/C++ rather than re-engineering Python apps into a faster language. 'At some point, you end up with one little piece of your system, as a whole, where you end up spending all your time. If you write that just as a sort of simple-minded Python loop, at some point you will see that that is the bottleneck in your system. It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language, because for most of what you're doing, the speed of the language is irrelevant.'"
Comment The Infancy of Medicine (Score 2) 121
OMG. I really do hope medicine outgrows its infancy during my lifetime.
Comment Re:Easier Voting = more uninformed voters (Score 1) 218
Direct democracy isn't what it is cracked up to be. (Sorry for any Americanism in that sentence). Which is why the Founders of the United States chose a different system, a _representative_ democracy in which people vote for wise and accomplished people to represent them, rather than allowing the masses to be swayed by specious arguments and tactics. The Founders were in many ways students of history—The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was being written by Gibbons at the same time and published in 1776–1789. The American system is not without its problems but it arguably has provided a more stable government than a direct democracy such as that of the ancient Greeks.
