That is technological progress. A huge swathe of the retail industry will be out of business by the end of this next decade, but it isn't a bad thing. All those clerks being paid minimum wage will drive society to reconsider the importance of full time employment for everyone if they can't stand around scanning items at a register.

I don't want to come off as belittling to anyone working retail though. But it is a crap job. Nobody wants to do it, besides for the money. And when we get all our goods directly through websites and direct delivery, a lot of the middle men of transportation and delivery can go away, and everything gets more streamlined.

Every clerk at a register today is bordering on functionally equivalent to new deal policies like digging holes to fill them. Once they no longer create value in the economy, they are functionally doing nothing.

Sounds like it is time for the iCar, iHouse, and iFood!

More importantly in this vein, as long as the yuan is pegged to the US dollar the cost of labor will never rise for China. They get the benefits of huge GDP growth without having any changes in wages or per capita growth because they are doing the same thing Germany does with the Euro on a grander scale.

Oh my god, I can't believe it!

Excuse the sarcasm, but it has been obvious for a decade that publishers and traditional investment firms into game development have been a defunct and dying breed, it has just taken forever for any real game studios to take the risk to stop getting fucked (losing the copyright to their own media, sharing most of the sales, having no rights to distribution or advertising) to get funding and publicity.

We have tons of waste from the traditional uranium plants to use up, might as well start building some reactors that produce almost no leftovers.

When Kepler comes out expect all these cards to significantly drop in price.

GCN was a huge cost on AMDs part, and Kepler will be a refinement of Fermi, so Nvidia will aggressively price the 600 series (especially since they won't launch for another 2 months) and make profit on them. And expect AMD to take a loss on the investment but not on the returns from fabrication on the 7900 series (assuming they fab the 7800 and lower cards on their old VLIW architecture like the roadmap from last years aid they would).

So when Kepler comes out, it will probably be aggressively priced, and AMD will drop prices to match. For now they are exclusively the only maker of "next gen" gpus after 2010s 500 and 6000 series, and Kepler is 2 months away, so AMD is milking it.

Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade, and it is more severe near the poles. Coastal water levels have risen by a few inches in the last decade.

Not doing anything possible to stop the planet from heating up until we get a runaway greenhouse effect is what is insane, especially when all we have to do is not even "that" hard - just stop burning fossil fuels that are just large amounts of carbon locked up in a solid as opposed to being in the atmosphere.

I'd call it a mistake just because they are dodging the bullet on parallel computing. Javascript is becoming a general purpose application architecture on the user side, except you have to use tricks to get multithread support. Either do the hard work to make JS work in parallel or give an alternative scripting language that uses static typing and a standard stack so we can easily mutlithread it for more computationally intensive web apps.

But I don't care what dangly bits are in your pants. I will probably never see you in person, you are just an ally, possibly a friend, in development.

I mean, the fundamental problem is that there are thousands of (general case) engineering major men who never interact with women because there IS a cultural divide on the front of women in engineering. Until the early years problem of women being indoctrinated into thinking the only way to live life is through socialization and pop culture knowledge dictates how good of a person you are, the fundamental problem won't be fixed. The open source community is full of people in the general sense that love developing software for everyone to use. That isn't a sex deterministic thing, and attraction to open source development shouldn't be sex derived.

The basic answer is that you won't change the thousands of men who think it is ok to sexually harass anyone with two X chromosomes on the internet. They just need to take the same stance on it that everyone else does on everything else - ignore them and they go away. If there are active developers on a project that would harass someone for having a 50% chance at birth roll one way instead of another, I wouldn't want to associate with them either.

But like I said, the problem is cultural. We might have laws saying women are equal in the workplace, but modern families raise kids on two distinct tracks depending on their chromosome composition, and it breeds this behavior. That needs to be fixed rather than trying to do damage control after the fact.

I'm not saying information being distributed on the internet accomplishes nothing, I just mean the political circle jerk on sd & hn & reddit about how broken and horrible the US political system has become, but you are preaching to the choir in all these places - educated, often technical, engineers, who are at least somewhat active in politics and in the 15 - 35 age bracket. In other words, the biggest voting minority block there is. If the message never reaches older people, or less educated people, then you have a tiny minority stake in the whole population of the country. And those groups aren't using social news sites, so you aren't winning anyone over talking about it here.

I am for the distribution of information, fact checking, and transparency of the crimes of politicians through the medium, just not the rampant circle jerk about how broken the system is. We arn't changing it by bitching about it to each other.

I'm already in change congress and rootstrikers, and I do vote. The point of my post was more along the lines that the majority of middle class America is complacent in its ignorance of the issues and they don't react as a body to the loss of freedoms because they are glued to reality TV and moral issues between candidates more so than the more technical and unsettling issues like how the US still maintains a larger military force than the rest of the world combined, spends more on military than the rest of the world combined, and goes deeper into debt every year than the rest of the world combined.

I do my part to try to change it, but an outspoken minority won't get the constitutional convention Lessing wants, and its what we need, but until either congress does something blatantly evil enough to upset the middle class and baby boomers into action, we are still a vocal, tiny minority.

And it isn't much of a conspiracy theory. There is plenty of documentation about how the corrupt congressmen take huge campaign contributions from big business, and then act on their behalf when elected. There are dozens of districts across the US that will always vote along a single party line no matter who runs, and they produce some of the most corrupt scum of the Earth because they rise to the top because they know to exploit the moral leanings of an unmovable voting block.

And no, I have not had first hand experience with corruption elsewhere because I live in the US. I know how bad it is elsewhere, how totalitarian the governments of Bulgaria, China, Pakistan, etc are, but saying we have it better than everyone else when what we have is corporate sellouts exploiting ignorance says a lot about progress in this modern age. Having the best pile of shit on Earth still leaves you with a pile of shit, and trying to make it less shitty is something everyone should be trying to do.

I know this thread is old, but I feel like trying to defend myself because quintus seems to think I'm a smug asshole. And don't get me wrong, I am a smug asshole, but I like to think I'm not evil all the time.

I don't claim to make perfect GUIs. I don't claim to be a know it all about everything Linux - I always tell myself I suck at software engineering because I don't like the command line and prefer Eclipse over Vi. And I speak from my personal experiences - I recently tried out Ubuntu again after having a long running Debian install that I have had work (and I was always using Synaptic to manage packages because of the aforementioned stupidity of myself in using apt-get). But I always seem to come back to needing to use BASH to get around seemingly simple problems, that a lot of the utilities I use that seem like they would have good GUIs end up being CL based, and that to fix a lot of problems or tweak settings I often need to resort to the CL.

That is my personal experience - other people have their own. That goes back to the GUI design thing, and the original point of the thread and all. And someone else said that artists and techologists are distinct and rare traits - I feel they are more closely intwined, because they are both creative practices. I feel creativity is a rare trait in people and is the general lead in to coding, architecture, engineering, art. They are all a means to an end - fulfilling a creative impulse. I can't draw worth a crap, but I feel like I have a sense of beauty and elegance that can lead me to design decent UIs, and I acknowledge beauty is opinionated and no design is perfect for everyone, but understanding general cases, what works for the average joe, newbie, and master, is really all that counts - not having that cursory understanding when designing UIs is pretty lazy.

And yes, many programmers don't want to make GUIs. That is fine, have someone else do it. No one tells you to, no one makes you, and nobody has the right to tell you you are lesser for finding button positioning droll. I am just saying there is no correlation between writing code and having no personal ability to design a coherent usable interface. They are different disciplines and one who is technical need not be artistic or vice versa, but the traits are correlated but there is no causal basis between them.

I know it is drony and hive minded and all that other jazz, but let us be honest: those in congress do not care if you want this bill or not. They just want it passed, so they get their payout by big media for passing it. They barely know how to use email because they are all ancient farts, but they are not ignorant - they know this law is destroying the most open medium of communication and exchange of information in history, and for politicians, it is a bad thing - educated and informed people will decide representatives based on their voting records, rather than talking points, and they want anything but to be held accountable.

SOPA / PIPA / NDAA all show the true colors of our political system in the USA - paid for by corporations, and always against the interests of the people, because career politicians need ways to keep people ignorant, voting for them, and preferably, not voting at all. The fewer people vote, the smaller their message needs to be, the less they need to spend on campaigning, and the more they can pocket. And then they can get paid off day after day by big business to pass laws completely against the spirit of America, freedom, and entrepreneurship (hello hundred year copyright) and sit on their laurels waiting for the next election cycle to talk about abortion, illegal immigrants, and nebulous "jobs" and who is making more "jobs".

I know I'm extremely hypocritical about saying it, because honestly, I do not want to inconvenience myself to change a broken political system I have inherited from hundreds of years of Americans. I want change to happen without having to make sacrifices for it. I want government to be run the way I want, even though I have no political experience. But we are losing our freedoms and we have lost our representation, so unless someone much better than myself, and much braver than myself, will step up (along with millions of other better, braver people) out of the woodwork to fix the broken system, we are just going downhill. And talking about it on the internet accomplishes nothing.

Preface: I'm just a programmer nerd who reads slashdot. I have no idea what I am talking about.

I wonder if it would be possible to have data storage as an ionization of a solid in the normal operating range of tech (and probably small, like carbon) where ionized atoms represent one bits and non ionized represent zero bits, and you can read atoms in some rigid lattice where the ionized ones represent ones and the neutral atoms are zeroes. Yea, there are huge problems, like preventing electron shell state dropping and keeping the electrons off the negatively charged carbon, but it seems like it would be a great objective considering the smaller data storage type after atom ionization will be measuring quark states to represent multi valued data.

Not to detract from the programmers are stupid bandwagon here, but I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way.

Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem, yes, but more so the problem is that Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together. A lot more stuff is user space than in windows / osx and the tradeoff is that user space stuff isn't tested with rigor to work 100% of the time like kernel mode stuff. It leaves Linux more secure but user space programs failing that average joe has no idea how to remedy does not make him happy.

But overall, as a programmer, I do take offense to not knowing how to design a UI. I know perfectly well how to. All you do is come at it from the perspective that it needs to work for someone who has no idea how anything works (aka, my mother) and someone who knows how everything works (aka, me, if I made it) and make sure there is no gap in the swathe of people between those extreme points where the design fails to, if not intuitively, at least give them the ability to change it to become intuitive for them, naturally favoring the lower end where significantly more people are than the high end.