BugBrother

>>But not all jobs disappeared

I wrote "all jobs" in one place and in another "a lot of software people [...] again".

Since you were also there, what I meant should be obvious...?

In my Swedish job market, there was also something similar around a decade earlier. But it was not only for software people.

>>American "hegemony" as you call it has only been good to the US' closest allies and trade partners. China, Russia and India to name three big ones have had to develop by themselves independent of American support

Are you aware of the democratic peace theory? Check wikipedia. In short, [stable] democracies don't have wars. Not even USA starts wars with (or intervene in) stable democracies.

Most of the cases "suffering" from USA are ~ evil juntas.

India is an exception, they have voluntarily turned to Russia for e.g. buying weapons -- I don't know if the country "had" to do anything, re USA (they do benefit from the global market). But Russia's junta prefers to cooperate with non-democracies -- and actively demonizes the world's working democracies. China is doing even worse jingoism than Russia.

In short -- don't mix up packs of thieves stealing countries with the countries themselves. Or with democratic governments.

>> Globalisation, unless EVERY single nation on Earth adopts isolationism both economically and socially, is unavoidable.

Why would globalization necessarily be handled in a good way? We could get the military empire building back; Russia and China have started.

Isn't there too much theorizing and teeth gnashing?

With Asia's fast rise and outsourcing, the increase in global work force has been much faster than the increase in capital investments.

It seems natural that while that happens, the average salaries will go down [or at a minimum stagnate] for the middle class in the old rich countries (supply/demand), since there are lots of well educated people coming from a poor environment.

USA already had larger GINI coefficients than the rest of the western world, which is natural with the size (more heterogenous). So the median values etc for living standards will reflect that.

Most everyone has forgotten the 2000 dot com crash, when all the computer jobs disappeared. This "learn to code" is just how it was then.

I would bet money that in less than five years, a lot of software people will be unemployed -- again. (If I win, good. If not, good. :-) )

I was noting that it was present today. It is just not discussed where I live regarding e.g. immigrants from those areas . You might have a higher media roof.

Swenglish (Swedish English) mangling of the word pederasty.

I was wondering about space applications.

A sheet might maybe self heal after gamma radiation, that is why I asked (depending on environment, there might not be much else to happen?). Most other radiation is charged and might be kept away with strong magnetic fields.

But, as I wrote, this was a long time ago.

Ok, afaik we're evolved to be programmed by culture -- we're more optimized to get respect from others than to earn money.

But... I wonder how much of this is an effect of an inability to see some things about other cultures, because of political correctness?

Some differences are just shocking to modern westerners.

If you have read a bit of mideaval history, you realize there are some similarity between traditional clan cultures and modern organized crime families; e.g. the lack of humanity assigned to outsiders. This is not possible to discuss, since some places on the planet still have similar societies.

Another example is that tolerated pederasm (greek/roman style) is not gone from the planet. It is hard to know, since it isn't really discussed even by e.g. NY Times.

(All these are obvious examples from my own media, yours might be different.)

That worked well for me.

I bought a laptop a couple of years ago off that list. Dell Latitude E5520. It is like a cheaper Thinkpad.

My (and others') point is this obvious thumbs rule: If you hit the disk, that I/O will dominate the latencies. Even while using a scripting language.

E.g. a DB that fits in RAM is different, of course. It is hence easy to create benchmarks that generates every possible result.

So is your comment relevant to my point? Is there something about that benchmark which contradict the previous thumbs rule?

(And yes... With lots of calculations, scripting languages aren't a good idea either in many cases. Also obvious.)

The point is that with a db which hits the disk, the different execution times will generally look like rounding errors.

In general -- the bottleneck for web servers are databases. That is why scripting languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) are used for web pages.

If processing speed is needed... well, note that databases are seldom written in scripting languages.

How much stress would radiation outside the Van Allen belts add?

(I could probably find this out myself, but it was quite a few years ago. I assume a sheet would be damaged by gamma?)

(Reading this a few days later in an open tab. :-) )

Imho the most important thing is to have a good design document for the data model. Partly because it often decides a lot of the structure of the code.

It is e.g. easier to rewrite code than realize that you lack some stuff you should have captured about customers years ago...

I don't disagree with anything you wrote, except the first sentence.

But I'm cynical about the possibility to get a new bytecode standard out, without e.g. MS sabotag... extending it. Half the value of asm.js should be that if there is a working system already in place, the motivations for such shenanigans lessens.

I can think of a few cases.

Most of them were reinventing the wheel. :-(

I think the chemists have a saying: "With a few hard and dedicated work weeks in the lab, you might save hours in the library!"

This is why unit testing took over the dynamic language world more than a decade ago.

And at least in Perl, which have a bit of extensible syntax, you can declare parameter types of methods/functions. That is especially a good idea for external APIs to libraries, etc.

All tools have quirks, which forces a bit of change in how you use them. You have to look at the total sum of these effects. How much extra days will it take to learn? How much will the work arounds cost you? Etc.

Granted, e.g. JavaScript have more weirdness than should be possible -- but is is fast, fun and has lots of use cases.

I came into this discussion many hours late, but I have to ask: Why are people discussing as if asm.js didn't exist?! It is fast. (It even support integers!)

To me, asm.js looks like a bad kludge -- and a great road ahead, just extend it a little bit over the next decade with the stuff compiler writers will clamor for.

Am I missing something?

That was a karma 4 acccount and this is much later, but...

The main problem imho is that the last time destabilization and military [threat] was used to steal land areas around Europe, it was by guys in mustasches... And the motivation was similar -- "protect" Russi... German speaking populations.

And right now the same methods are used in another area. Just like the 1930s, too.

That second area will hardly be the last, if it works again. "Peace in our time" failed last time...

As an European, this is just scary and everything really needs to be done to stop this before there is another big war.

>>[NoSQL] are supposed to give more flexibility in the early stages of projects

I agree with what you wrote.

But my point is that _changing_ requirements can screw you, if you find that you _later_ need relational capabilities.

I agree, Mongo is easy and fast.

My problem with NoSQL is that you MUST know there won't be changing requirements:

Later you might need to do the equivalent of joining 3-4 tables. Then you have trouble... But I'm a coward that look both left and right before crossing a street.

I've never been to Israel, but from what I've read:

- If you get three Israelis in a room, on most subjects you'll find four very different viewpoints.

- The media are free and have a large range. From what I've seen in English, much more allowed than the almost censored Swedish media.

(But sure, it is a country in a permanent low intensive war -- and the only country in the world with a nuclear weapon threat over their heads. That will influence the general attitude quite a lot.)

Addendum:

General Fusion has gotten tens of millions of dollars from serious investors. The idea that their design would need to accelerate many tons of molten lead to 2 km/s every pulse (i.e. once per second!) is just too ridiculous.

I need to be less polite/trollable.

Probably not from Russia, in Romania's case. But it is a point, maybe not worth betting on.

High living costs.

There are lots of nice places in Eastern Europe where the living costs are low, the weather nice and the scenery beautiful.

And in quite a few (e.g. Romania) the government is too busy stealing stuff to bother about oppressing freedoms, except maybe about elections...

So your claim is that when "2 km/s" is referenced on page 3 of the reference, the first which obviously is about the implosion speed after the shock is not related to the second -- which is the necessary speed for the lead.

So you repeat the claim of 2km/s for a vortex in the GF reactor.

A few decimeters irregularity in the bottom of the vortex for the lower plasma injector invalidates that, which you certainly know.

I have no physics background (cs/chemistry), but considering e.g. your insisting on the exact definition of Asimov's prediction above (which I acknowledged in my first comment), I believe you're trolling.

So I'd really like to see other's arguments on this. I'm not going to spend time to get the cobwebs out of the part of my head where old math studies are stored for what likely is a troll. I have lost too much time as it is.

Edit: I don't think you really care, but cavity compression for a 1 m sphere was done 2012. Google for a pdf called "Update on Progress at General Fusion". ("Fusion Power Associates, 2012 Annual Meeting")

>> Quoting from the paper, 4 paragraphs after the 2km/s you referenced

The paper doesn't even discuss what you claim. This is the paragraph before the one you quoted:

"There are several important flows in the concept MTF reactor. However, this work focuses only on the compressible aspects. Consequently, issues such as the vortex formation and cycling lead through the reactor to generate steam are left to follow up work by General Fusion."

I do think you know you are misrepresenting the content of the paper.

Your calculations are derived from a mild parabola, I'm not going to bother looking up where the formula fails. We're talking about a globe, which must change this drastically. Which I frankly also think you're aware of.

AGAIN: 10+G in a centrifuge would certainly put any liquid against the wall. And already 1000 RPMs @ 20 cm is > 110G! (See reference in previous comment.)

After your misrepresentation of the paper above and forcing me to repeat trivial points repeatedly I'm not going to bother with the differing results from your math or how it might be applicable to a sphere.

>> I am still gob-smacked to think of that much lead spinning a 2km/sec.

That is NOT the value for the spin speed. The paper says:

"The collapse of the cavity is accelerated by geometric focusing, resulting in cavity wall velocities over 2 km/s at the end stages of collapse"

The spin speed -- think centrifuge, as in a washing machine or in a chemical lab. Lead is high density, but you'd hardly need 2 km/s (around 12K RPMs!!). That is ridiculous.

(I do think I've seen articles on that the demands on the pistons might be smaller than the first calculations, after experiments. The self reinforcing shock wave might be involved.)

Edit: If you really need to estimate the spin speed, this should work? Consider how many G you'd need at the inner part of the evacuated tube. Then check that on some online calculation (there is a simple formula) to get the RPM (and hence speed) instead of trying the "back of the envelope" thing... :-)

Edit 2: I googled a page with the G formula for RPMs. 0.2 meter empty in the middle at 1000 RPMs gives 112 G which should be <cough> more than ample. :-) The formula use (RPM/1000)², so 12,000 RPMs... I don't even want to think about > 1400 G on tons of lead!! http://clinfield.com/2012/07/how-to-convert-centrifuge-rpm-t...

Addendum:

The TED talk was on Youtube (and ted.com is up now). It was for a non-technical audience, the message is that the GF target is to make economical power plants. A commercial venture, as I wrote.

The only real news is that the plasma injectors are probably done now, over the last month.

Again: I used the term "full sized prototype" in the first comment. Which is not exactly what Asimov wrote. The remaining possible show stoppers are less plasma physics and more mechanical, which is certainly better than what Asimov predicted.

(I wrote repeatedly that the main thing missing from the planned prototype to be a prototype power plant is a heat exchanger, like most every other power plant that heats a medium. It boggles incredibility to assume you failed reading that.)

Your link is from 2009, when they were new to building experimental hardware. Hardly an authoritative reference.

Edit: A simulation of the vortex. It was hard to find, took me 3 minutes with Google: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~jgregson/images/JamesGregsonMAScThesis...

Edit 2: The old papers, before much experiments: http://www.generalfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/GF_S...

Edit 3: The recent TED talk is (claimed) to be up today, but the ted.com site is down as I write.