Actually video conferencing fills a real need. People like being able to look at each other when they talk (we get a lot out of nonverbal communication).

On current mobile networks you just can't do that though (that's why facetime is wifi only, I gather). Not to mention that it will still drain your battery pretty damn fast. You make it sound like it's really easy to do right now, while the conditions haven't even yet arrived.

3D displays on phones seems fairly implausible. An extra camera will take space, and why would we want to use that much extra resources just to see our buddy's face in 3D? Now if they had said "in 4 years time, we will have video calling generally available on phones", that sounds pretty damn plausible.

Oh, you mean your star scientist friend? If he can study stars I'd say we can study computers (and not just computing).

That's the nicest thing I've read on /. in a while. Have a merry christmas. :-)

The term informatics is often used too. The problem being that people might not recognize it as being the same thing as computer science though. In English, I usually use computer science because people have a better grasp of what that is. Not that they have any idea what it really entails.

On the other hand, I'd argue that the use of computers is not just incidental to the field. A lot of computer science is the study of automated computing tools, i.e. what can we calculate, how, how fast, what are good abstractions/representations of data and algorithms, ... If it was just about computing (in the narrow sense), it would still be a subfield of mathematics. Computer science isn't really a misnomer, because while the ideas can stand on their own without the presence of a computing device to use them with, that very device is often the corner stone of what we do.

The cell phone market is a natural oligopoly though, not the kind of free market you're thinking of.

While it's true that the GP poster was probably wrong (I'm not that sure that CDDL is less restrictive, but probably), it's also true that Sun designed the CDDL specifically to be incompatible with the GPL.

So yes, linux is under the GPL and thus can't accept ZFS into mainline, but let's not forget which kernel was first (or at least, licensed under an open source license first).

I mostly agree. The moon is definitely doable. I don't really know why you'd want to do that (really, what problem is that solving? what new things are you learning that you can't on earth?), but it is definitely attainable. Just horribly expensive for what it is: a bunker in the middle of nowhere that has no strategic purpose and only contributes a little bit to science or engineering. I'd much rather see that money spent on some real science, or perhaps on creating habitats in certain places on earth (oceans, deserts, ...).

The biggest problem though with this discussion is that the idea of sending humans off planet as a type of backup for humanity is really flawed. That would work, if we had the technology to send many and make them self-sustainable. If you put a colony on the moon, anything below a couple million people will not be self-sufficient (think of all the branches of industry, all the technology it would have to replicate, just a no-go). In fact, a good estimate I saw put it at about 100 million people, for our current level of technology. And you wouldn't even have the abundance of resources that we have here on earth, making it so much harder still.

The truth is, if earth goes, whoever you put on the moon is screwed just as much as we are. So let's try not to make that happen.

I hardly doubt you'd have much trouble finding 50 men in any country (let's forget the smaller outliers for a second), to take the chance, no matter how stupid. If reality TV can do it, so can your theoretical Mars mission.

Anyway, you said:

Where exactly is the opportunity then? Why would China cripple itself economically just to spend a couple dozen people to their deaths? Prestige?

I posted this elsewhere already, but can you imagine the costs of shipping even a million men over to Mars? Your suggestion is a bit out there in terms of feasibility.

While I agree with you the moon is a better target, a prison scenario is not very likely. It's more cost effective to stick them in a prison on earth somewhere.

Which highlights a problem with all these plans. We live in a gravity well. Getting out of it takes effort. Until we find a way to ferry a couple of million people back and forth every month, any sort of plan for large scale colonization is doomed from the start. We simply don't have the energy budget to blow on it (general price/kilogram reflects this). In the very best case, we'll start some sort of research station on the moon.

Colonization of mars is a pipe dream. Maybe in a couple generations we can start thinking about it.

Of all the problems with python, whitespace delimitation really doesn't rank very highly. You get it wrong a couple of times when you first start out in the language, after that it really doesn't tend to bother you anymore. It's really nothing like Makefiles, since the interpreter can afford to be a lot smarter and you will get a warning much sooner than in Makefiles. Not to mention that you set your editor up once and then you always indent te same way (even auto reindenting works most of the time in vim).

I think It's all personal taste really. I find python code more readable, but I've known people who said the reverse. I think we can agree that people should know a midlevel scripting language like this, in any case.

Your comment doesn't make much sense. Python and Perl really are sort of on the same level in functionality/performance characteristics (there is some string parsing that would definitely be easier in Perl, but it's not a huge gap). I reckon what the GP was getting at is that they're all somewhat slow for certain tasks (where you would grab java, C++ or C in that order of increasing need for performance).

Really, the OP should just learn one of (python, ruby, perl) and be done with it. One can get along fine in the job market for now with java/c++, but I can only imagine how he handles common scripting tasks. Definitely a gap there.

Java has try-finally, with the obvious downside that you need to wrap everything in there and you go at least two levels deep for something like a file copy (i.e. try-except wraps two try-finally's). JDK7 or 8 should have a with keyword or something of the like, which will hopefully help. You definitely have a point that it isn't very readable. I'm more concerned here though with how they access OS/window system primitives (i.e. windows etc). That might be a cause of a lot of our pain.

OTOH, other VM languages have the same problem, and they seem to do just fine.

I don't know, aside from all the exception handlers it's pretty much just C, right?

D'oh. Yeah I meant to say SWT. I have written a GUI or two in AWT. It makes Swing look good, I think that says enough.

I personally think the class design for Swing was overly ambitious and probably just too constrained by their desire to reuse at least some of the AWT stuff. SWT provided a clean break, but apparently that didn't help matters much. I'm not at all sure that the problem is really inherent in the language as such, but these things are hard to quantify.

It's also not as if a decent UI layer actually needs to be wonderful and fun to work in. I write some JSP now and then and it's painful, but it works (though btw, also can have huge rendering times considering what you're doing is outputting some text to a page). I've heard people gripe about how awful coding their UIs in ObjC (+cocoa?) can be, but they get it done anyway. I feel the error was in trying to provide a "pure" class framework to do the work, instead of some hack that actually works.

The problem being that if you implement Java or a Java-like language right now, you're not sure whether you won't be staring at the business end of a million dollar lawsuit in a year's time. So people will wait out what happens in the Google lawsuit, which might take years (actually, if it's like SCO at all, it will take years).

By the time we're sure we can implement a JVM without getting our asses sued, people might well have moved on to different languages (I know I'm considering it).