IMO programming is almost nothing like natural language.

I tend to be highly skeptical of the "Utopian future" where everybody is replaced by robots. Will some jobs be replaced by automation? Sure. But I suspect it will be way fewer than folks on this thread expect.

In terms of a post-apocalyptic future you can prepare in one of two ways. You can hoard up a bunch of supplies and focus on being self-sufficient, i.e. learning how to farm, hunt and make your own clothes, or you can do a little of that but also learn a skill that's likely to remain valuable after the apocalypse. That's where I was going with obstetrics and trauma treatment. This approach is also a hedge against the case where the apocalypse never actually happens. You get to be compensated well right now, which isn't always the case with the guy living in a bunker with lots of guns and canned goods.

When we (hypothetically) revert to the stone age there won't be much need for, say, dermatologists. Or anesthesiologists, for that matter, since we will no longer have access to all the fancy drugs they use. Certainly in that scenario the ability of an OB to affect outcomes will be diminished, but you'd probably still be better off with an OB during delivery than without one. Working in the E.R. and knowing how to deal with random trauma would also be a good choice in a low-tech post-apocalyptic future.

Seems like we need a more precise definition of renaissance. My pay hasn't suffered and I haven't had trouble finding jobs. Standard warnings about small sample size apply.

Tell her to become an M.D. and specialize in obstetrics. Unless there are no humans, humans will still have babies, and the process of delivery will still be fraught with problems. If she likes art, then maybe industrial design. Widgets may end up being 3d-printed, but someone still has to make them look pretty.

This is hard to square with my experience. I know folks who used to pay money to see movies who no longer do because they can just watch them for free at home only days after their theatrical release (if not earlier). That said, these guys are a pretty small minority among the set of all people I know who like to watch movies.

The research shows a clear trend of the desirable cities becoming even more desirable, to the point where it's almost a necessity for city planners to lure college graduates or face decline.

I drew a different conclusion from this article. I know the article's focus was on attracting college graduates so that the city can prosper, but I instead considered the contrapositive: If a city is not prospering, then it has a lower-than-average percentage of college graduates. I see it as another confirmation of residential segregation.

More and more, there is becoming a "separate and not equal" divide in communities based on their socioeconomic status. As a teacher, I see it all the time in schools: there are some schools that leverage the taxpayer for new buildings, new technology, higher salaries, and less stressful work environments, while many others struggle due to an inability to levy. Instead of governments focusing on what to do about producing and/or attracting college graduates, perhaps it should instead consider what to do about the absence of them in their community.

If the USA is the bastion of freedom, capitalism and independence, why are cab licenses limited by city bureaucrats? Why not let everyone who qualifies swim in the taxicab business leaving those who cannot stand the waters perish? I just don't get it!

Because historically taxis have engaged in a number of fraudulent and unsavory practices, outright racism in some cases and have generally made cities look bad. So there was a legitimate reason to regulate them in order to ensure that they didn't bilk (or take the long route) for gullible tourists, refuse rides to people of the wrong color, install fake meters, organize into a racket to overcharge customer or skip on carrying decent insurance.

Then, lo-and-behold, the well-meaning regulators were captured by the taxicabs (because they were smart) and turned around and instituted any number of illegitimate regulations designed to stifle competition. This is generally pretty easy in a democracy because when there's a small number of cabbies with a very large interest in certain policies, they can often get their way when there are a large number of citizens with contrary interests. It's the law of diffused costs versus concentrated benefits.

So now, instead of being predictably idiotic with our left/right pro/anti regulation, maybe we should think about stupid regulation versus smart regulation. Then we could distinguish a rule require cabbies to carry insurance for their passengers with one that limits the number of medallions to some artifical number. Or one that requires accurate metering of any form with one that requires a specific brand or type of metering. Or a law that requires cabbies to serve any part of the city with one that requires them to drive home from the airport empty instead of picking up a fare immediately after dropping one off (this one really I don't understand -- there is a line for cabs at the terminal!).

On the other hand, nah, let's just hurf about it....

Maybe The Oatmeal should take a cue from the guy who started a $10 campaign for potato salad on Kickstarter. He seems to get a pretty good return on his requests.

I'm going to visit the museum in an Elio!

Yes Slashdot, I even left your gclid in the URL so you get another ad credit for each click. :-P

I learned to program with C++, you insensitive clod! And we had to write our own stacks, heaps and vectors without using the standard library, and that's the way we liked it!

I actually bought it for my PS3, and the graphic quality seems pretty good to me. Of course, I'm more about the game play than anything else.

It's pretty fun, but a lot more driving & gunplay than I was expecting, and there's no real feeling of consequence.

It's easy to get good karma simply by catching criminals, and if you accidentally kill a bystander, it's a minor hit to your karma. I'd expect it to tank, but it doesn't. Hacking people's bank accounts seems to not have any effect, which seems like it should. It would be nice if they had offered a white hat/black hat path that you could take.

Also, if you want, it's pretty easy to level up right away by simply doing the criminal detections and hacking everyone in site in order to buy 5-star weapons from the get go. There doesn't seem to be an XP cap on the criminal investigations, and they're always worth the same.

I actually like Java. That said, the big losers here (other than Java) if Python really does supplant Java are the languages in Python's "space" against which it competes. So...Ruby. I'm ignoring PHP. If the popularity gap between Ruby and Python grows wide enough then people may start choosing Python even for those applications where Ruby might be the better choice.

Ooops. Left out the link. Here it is.

Any argument about a "shortage" of labor will involve a cost component. If you're willing to pay $1M/year there's no shortage of competent developers to be had. Obviously it's not feasible for employers to pay that much. If a given industry sees the average salary of employees in similar positions increase steeply over time (relative to other professions) then one can make an argument that there's a labor shortage in that industry.