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Comment Re:Or maybe... (Score 1) 309

But there are so many languages, most of which seem to give little or anything new. The developers claim that they are better than C or C++. However C and C++ are hardly state of the art in language design. I'd be more interested to know how they compare to OCaml or Common Lisp, and whether perhaps improving one of those languages would be an easier option. Each new language seems like so much work in new frameworks and libraries and developer migration effort that they should be put into wide scale use quite sparingly.

Comment Re:Minimum wages create unemployment (Score 1) 1040

Government statistics don't tell the whole story. You are counted as employed if you work 1 hour per week. Add up all the part time people who would prefer to be full-time employed and all those who are retired or studying or whatever but would prefer to be employed, and you'd get a much higher number.

The $16 minimum wage doesn't even tell the whole story in Australia. There are legally mandated "award" rates for most occupations that are somewhat higher.

I live in a regional town, where the local economy apparently can't copy with the wage rates set in the large cities, and unemployment is more like 12%.

Comment Re:Minimum wages create unemployment (Score 1) 1040

You have a point. However I still think it's a stupid system. If the government thinks that the low paid don't receive enough money, then it should just give them some more, not put them out of work and then give them a benefit that's probably even lower than they'd have been receiving in a job. I think the benefit is less than half what the minimum wage would be for working a 40 hour week.

Comment Re:robots (Score 2) 402

It's not so much the space travel technology, but the technology that would allow a truely sustainable human colony in a hostile environment. Show me that it's even possible to build a sustainable human colony in a domed city somewhere on Earth (without importing food, water, computers etc.,) and then perhaps it will be time to start thinking about living on Mars. Then you can start worrying about all the true space problems, such as shortage of water, excessive radiation, and wrong gravity and temperatures.

Comment Re:robots (Score 2) 402

The robot missions are limited to using the equipment that they've taken with them. Woudn't a human mission have exactly the same limitation? There's a limit to what you can achieve with a pickaxe and a screwdriver. Anyway, I expect that a human mission would be so tied up in just keeping the humans alive, that they'd have little time or resources for any actual research.

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