The value of my home just went up by $146,000 this year alone -- and before you start accusing me of being too greedy, know that I'm not interested in selling, just living here. All that extra value is pure fluff, the stuff that dot-com stocks were made of. The problem is, I'm being forced to pay property taxes that are going up at the rate of 25% a year just to keep my house.
This is why property taxes applied to residential homes are simply a flawed concept. Unlike almost every single other asset I own, my home appreciates in value and I, usually, have no desire to sell. The government penalises me because others lust after something of mine that I don't even want to sell.
Treating peoples' homes like assets is destestable anyway. It's not a credit on a piece of paper to me. It's my home. I live here. To be forced out of your own home due to the actions of others is really a disgusting concept. The worst part is, if you tried to make your home look delapidated to drive away the investors, you would be sued!
The big problem in the States is the government's crazy dollar creation (what we call inflation is directly caused by the Fed's out of control printing of dollars).
No. What we call inflation is caused by simple human greed. Prices are discreetly hiked by companies looking to make just that little bit extra. The cycle begins, inflation ensues. The governments job is to find a way to stop the cycle spiralling out of control.
Some people believe a business' only goal is to generate profits for the owners, but this in totally untrue. A business operates to generate profits in the long run, not the short run. The only way to profit in the long run is to make your customers happy and return for more.
Just to let you know, you're operating on a completely different set of principles to 99% of the companies out there. Most business is about the fast buck. If your rate of profit growth has not increased this quarter, you're classified as a failing business.
When you take a salaried job, you give up having to worry about these things in exchange for job security.
Salaried job security? What the hell is that!? I wasn't aware this was on offer. Can I get that in writing?
People will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm convinced that these kinds of games are completely wasted being developed for a console. They really belong on a PC instead of being hindered by the limitations of consoles.
You are seriously, seriously, overestimating the ability of PCs. With a 3GHz, dual core, 2GB RAM, Top level graphics card with VRAM, Shadow of The Colossus would crawl, crawl to a halt unless the graphics were turned down to a level where 10 fps and heavy pixelation was acceptable.
To suggest that a game as technically complex and visually stunning as SOTC would look anywhere near as good running on an modern OS with all the overheads that entails, verses running on a "bare metal" console, is ludacrious.
Basically, it's like saying that C++ numerical code is going to run faster than FORTRAN. Good luck with that,
The PS2 has always had a deplorably pathetic amount of video RAM, and it shows - especially in big games like SoC where the same tiny aliased texture is reused and remapped all over the place.
No it doesn't. The artistic design more than makes up for the lack of texture quality. A higher res game with less creative scenery would look a lot worse.
If you want to win, you need to get everyone on board and lock up or kill every possible enemy and bomb them into oblivion. Think Dresden in WW2 or Nagasaki. That's how you break the enemy's morale. You have to decimate them. Think hundreds of Gitmo's. That's how you win a war. You kill them.
No. That's how you lose. That's how you lose everything. Your pride, your integrity, your freedoms. Everything.
Don't believe me. Try and remember that the other side in WWII engaged in "morale defeating excercises" even worse than those mentioned above. Their societies are still living in shame. Forever burdened with the crimes their countries have committed.
Take for instance, a gene that inhibits the bodies ability to produce a key protein. This is detected at birth and the solution is a pill that must be taken for the rest of a child's life. Not only is this extremely dangerous, but it is arguably unethical to pass on such curse to your offspring. Is it wise to have portions of the population completely reliant on a drug?
People with sickle cell disease would probably be described by some as "Pissing into the (gene) pool". They potentially pass on a debilitating and potentially deadly illness to their offspring. It would seem on the face of it, arguably, be unethical for any parent to pass on such a deviant gene to their children if they could potentially avoid doing so. A clear candidate of genetic eugenic treatment.
Oops! Sickle cell disease is most prevailant in populations at significant risk from malaria, by far a worse disease. Turns out that carriers of the gene are at a reduced risk of dying from malaria infections due to the special properties of the sickle cells. So what, you may well ask.
Here's a scenario. In this century, private genetic modification of offspring becomes popular in the United States. By near universal demand, the undesired sickle cell gene is systematically erradicated as standard in embryo selections, genetic screenings, what have you. All fine and dandy so far. People have stopped pissing in the pool.
Then, in the following century, the world temperature increases by, say 2 degrees. The air becomes more humid, and the overall climate becomes more amienable to malaria carrying mosquitos and the like. Malaria spreads like wildfire throughout the country.
Suddenly, the population in the US has, though its own genetic cleansing, lost a huge percentage of its potential sickle cell carrying population, and hence is less malaria resistant. This is obviously a problem. What's more, there is now a much reduced chance of the available sickle cell genes in the pool to evolve into a more successful anti-malaria measures. Future generations of US citizen continue to suffer the effects of this blunder for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
What makes a gene good? What makes one bad? Who decides this? Are "autistic" genes bad? Are "blue eye" genes good? Are genes that make us "smarter" good? Are genes that make us more "musical" good? Who decides? Who is qualified to decide? Who can predict the future?
Answer: No one. The most efficient way for the gene pool to adapt to best fit future circumstances, is by random searches in present circumstances. The world is ever changing, and good and bad are subjective terms, especially when applied to genes. Any nation that allows or even encourages widescale genetic engineering of offspring will quickly end up with a stagnant gene pool. Probably within 2 or three generations. It would be that fast.
Countries with stagnant gene pools can expect homogenous populations, devoid of diversity, prone to to pandemics, lacking impetus for change or innovation, and lacking specialist skills in a variety of areas. Countries which rely on good old random mutation on the other hand, will have healthy, diverse, adaptable populations, that are more ready for changes in their environment
If you stop people pissing in the pool, your kids will all grow up with allergies.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining.
Coal contains on average 3ppm uranium.
By comparision ordinary soil contains 1.8-5ppm uranium.
Coal fueled power plants have aerosol filters. Fields, roads, deserts, and lawns do not.
Could people please stop perpetuating this idea that coal is radioactive please. Coal is a kinematic and chemical pollutant, not a radioactive one. Unless you consider your breakfast cereal to be radioactive.
If we want to preferentialy breed inteligence into future generations we're going to have to do it intentionaly, either by a direct process of eugenics (possibly by giving financial benefits to inteligent people who have children and heavily taxing less inteligent people who do...
Didn't you RTFA? The microcephaly genes responisble for larger brain size have independantly evolved in seperate populations. Evolution is already taking care of human intelligence.
While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
No. No. No. Eugenics is not just wrong. It's painfully stupid.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Randomness is the process which drives evolution. The universe is a vast, unpredicable chaotic system. It is only by randomly searching through many possible solutions that a species can hope to adapt to any enviornment.
The minute you take out randomness, by taking away genes or introducing them, you've stopped evolving, and have started specialising. And guess what happens to specialist species when their enviornment changes? That's right. They die.
Evolve dolphins with bigger lungs so they can dive deeper, kill off all lesser lunged dolphins. Then earths 02 levels drop by 2%. Ooops. Specialised, deep sea feeding dolphins are dead meat. With a random system, there would still be some lower lung capacity dolphins around.
Think this doesn't apply to people? Ask yourself this? Can you say with certainty what genes will be beneficial or detrimental to humanities survival in 1 million years time? What about 10,00 years time? 100 years? 10 years? Who would have predicted even 20 years ago that "geek" traits would be in such demand? Can you say what genes are beneficial or detrimental right now!?
Yet you want to throw out the single most powerful aspect of evolution. Random chance. It's got us where we are today, and if you think anyone can engineer an entire planet and its ecosystem half as well as random evolution, I'd like to see you try.
For an example of the superiority of evolution over engineering, just check out evolved antennas. NASA seems to think random evolution is just fine.
see, once an organism has reproduced and passed on it's genes, it no longer has a genetic "need" to stay alive.
Very, very true. A friend of mine is working with genetic algorithims. His original attitude was that the fittest solutions from every generation should be allowed to propagate forever. No death due to age.
I managed to persuade him that this was a bad idea, because if a freak, unoptimal solution produced locally optimal results, the population would tend towards only locally optimal solutions, not global ones. The freak chances would hold onto their personally lucrative solutions forever, to the detrement of the entire population.......rather like monarchies now that I think of it.
What are the side effects of this science on religon and religous tradition?
The religious leaders at the pulpit look like fools and their flocks' doubt begins to spread to other areas of teaching like those on sociological pecking order, sin, sexuality, charity, etc, etc...
Most leaders are, somewhat understandably, thrown into a state of panic as their consequent status is severly reduced. They tend to resort to extreme measure as a result. Hence Intelligent Design and Televangelism.
Some people lead long, healthy active lives and never reproduce through choice, lack of opportunity or possibly just inadequate social skills. Isaac Newton famously died a virgin.
Precisely. And yet Newton undoubtedly had an effect on the general society around him, not least through his work in the mint. The overall population benefited from his labours, although he never himself returned his genes to the general pool.
Lets say, as is generally thought, that Newton had genes which gave him an extreme "geek" factor. This factor benefits the general populace, although the "geek" genes themselves may never be passed on directly. However, the potential for such genes to be expressed is passed on through, for example, Newton's siblings and close relatives.
Evolution works on a macro population level, not just on an individual organisim by organism basis.
One generation is enough. I know someone who was born with six fingers and toes. They were aputated, but the genetic propensity to grow the appendages is still there somehow.
Genetics probably isn't as discrete as that, but certainly the genes like microcephaly genes discussed in the article can and do turn on and off from generation to generation according to randomness.
Almost Identical eh? That's a pretty misleading statement. Even Joe Sixpack will call bull. He won't be too far wrong.
There a little thing called Chaos Theory. Without getting into details, what it means is, even the slightest change in the initial state of a chaotic system can lead to vastly different results, and the differences will grow as the system evolves.
What's more, complex unpredicable properties will emerge as the system evolves further. Order of a kind may emerge, but only on a general level. Locally, a chaotic system is usually completely unpredicable from the initial variables.
Basically, over time, the system just changes too much to keep track of. None of this is anything Joe Sixpack couldn't have told you anyway, albiet phrased differently, and only when he was inclined and sober, or possibly drunk.
So when you say that one genome is "Almost Identical" to another, that's pretty misleading. Phenotype maturation is undoubtedly a chaotic process in the initial stages, and observe the differences (and similarities) between individual people, let alone different species.
So a mouse genotype might be "Almost Identical" to a humans, but don't expect the end phenotype to be in any way human looking with even 98% genotype "similarity". Unless you consider chimpanzees to be human looking.
Yes it does take several objects to read and write a file, but then you have complete control over HOW the file is being read and written, including inserting your own filter classes.
If you have to go to such trouble, why did you leave C++ in the first place?
Java is a language designed for people who already know how to program. It starts off, from day one, with object orientation concepts, scope, namespaces, system calls, and in some Hello world cases, typecasting. All this verses a one liner in other languages.
Using Java as a teaching language is a recipe for disaster. Students won't grok it, will abuse its framework, and come away with a totally backwards understanding of how programming works. That is if they don't walk away in disgust at the first example.
Showing someone Java's "Hello World" as their first program is an insult every andragogical principle ever written. It's a personal insult to each and every student in the class, and a clear indicator of the incompetance and/or disinterest of the educator.
They have no concept as to what goes on under the covers. What it means when I go and create 1000's of strings. Or what it means to have a Hash Table vs a Stack, etc.
An important point to note here, is that most programmers nowadays don't need to be aware of this. At least not to the extent they used to.
More and more, business and industry needs software to simply automate simple tasks. As processing power increases, as memory space grows, it's not necessarily the case that the basic tasks people need done will grow to match them. Thus it becomes less important for a programmer to optimise or worry about optimisation.
In addition, although more programmers will be required to create software, they will not be required to delve into programmings basic complexities. It's not required you know about opcodes and memory addresses to write HTML, and soon it will be th ecase that you won't need to know when coding business apps. At all.
In short, the future legions of greasemonkey coders will be using Ruby on Rails, not C and FORTRAN. When the job gets too big, complex and nasty for them or a hardware upgrade to handle, they'll call in the high priced consultants who can still code in low level procedural languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Why put in the effort for an extra $30 or so a week?
Because it takes an amount of money most people don't have to start a business.
The value of my home just went up by $146,000 this year alone -- and before you start accusing me of being too greedy, know that I'm not interested in selling, just living here. All that extra value is pure fluff, the stuff that dot-com stocks were made of. The problem is, I'm being forced to pay property taxes that are going up at the rate of 25% a year just to keep my house.
This is why property taxes applied to residential homes are simply a flawed concept. Unlike almost every single other asset I own, my home appreciates in value and I, usually, have no desire to sell. The government penalises me because others lust after something of mine that I don't even want to sell.
Treating peoples' homes like assets is destestable anyway. It's not a credit on a piece of paper to me. It's my home. I live here. To be forced out of your own home due to the actions of others is really a disgusting concept. The worst part is, if you tried to make your home look delapidated to drive away the investors, you would be sued!
The big problem in the States is the government's crazy dollar creation (what we call inflation is directly caused by the Fed's out of control printing of dollars).
No. What we call inflation is caused by simple human greed. Prices are discreetly hiked by companies looking to make just that little bit extra. The cycle begins, inflation ensues. The governments job is to find a way to stop the cycle spiralling out of control.
Some people believe a business' only goal is to generate profits for the owners, but this in totally untrue. A business operates to generate profits in the long run, not the short run. The only way to profit in the long run is to make your customers happy and return for more.
Just to let you know, you're operating on a completely different set of principles to 99% of the companies out there. Most business is about the fast buck. If your rate of profit growth has not increased this quarter, you're classified as a failing business.
When you take a salaried job, you give up having to worry about these things in exchange for job security.
Salaried job security? What the hell is that!? I wasn't aware this was on offer. Can I get that in writing?
People will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm convinced that these kinds of games are completely wasted being developed for a console. They really belong on a PC instead of being hindered by the limitations of consoles.
You are seriously, seriously, overestimating the ability of PCs. With a 3GHz, dual core, 2GB RAM, Top level graphics card with VRAM, Shadow of The Colossus would crawl, crawl to a halt unless the graphics were turned down to a level where 10 fps and heavy pixelation was acceptable.
To suggest that a game as technically complex and visually stunning as SOTC would look anywhere near as good running on an modern OS with all the overheads that entails, verses running on a "bare metal" console, is ludacrious.
Basically, it's like saying that C++ numerical code is going to run faster than FORTRAN. Good luck with that,
The PS2 has always had a deplorably pathetic amount of video RAM, and it shows - especially in big games like SoC where the same tiny aliased texture is reused and remapped all over the place.
No it doesn't. The artistic design more than makes up for the lack of texture quality. A higher res game with less creative scenery would look a lot worse.
It's only a matter of time before tinfoil hats become 802.11 compliant! Then Cisco will know your every thought!!!
...next it'll be frikkin' sharks with laser beams.
That's wireless IP based laser beams, thank you very much. Oh, and the sharks will also be controlled over IP.
Now, you shouldn't just mod him down for the marketing alone, but more for the lack of effort. I mean, his sig just completely gives the game away!
Slashdot should demand a higher standard of viral marketing troll. We deserve better than this amature.
Welcome to the new Global Capitalism; where monopoly is just a word, and competition is a new criminal offense.
In Soviet Russia, best science holds YOU!
No it's not.
the name of the unit is "Kelvin", not "degrees Kelvin"
Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to Slashdot. Where people can't get more retentive without studying anal warts.
If you want to win, you need to get everyone on board and lock up or kill every possible enemy and bomb them into oblivion. Think Dresden in WW2 or Nagasaki. That's how you break the enemy's morale. You have to decimate them. Think hundreds of Gitmo's. That's how you win a war. You kill them.
No. That's how you lose. That's how you lose everything. Your pride, your integrity, your freedoms. Everything.
Don't believe me. Try and remember that the other side in WWII engaged in "morale defeating excercises" even worse than those mentioned above. Their societies are still living in shame. Forever burdened with the crimes their countries have committed.
Do you want that to happen to the United States?
Take for instance, a gene that inhibits the bodies ability to produce a key protein. This is detected at birth and the solution is a pill that must be taken for the rest of a child's life. Not only is this extremely dangerous, but it is arguably unethical to pass on such curse to your offspring. Is it wise to have portions of the population completely reliant on a drug?
Here's a better example. Sickle cell disease.
People with sickle cell disease would probably be described by some as "Pissing into the (gene) pool". They potentially pass on a debilitating and potentially deadly illness to their offspring. It would seem on the face of it, arguably, be unethical for any parent to pass on such a deviant gene to their children if they could potentially avoid doing so. A clear candidate of genetic eugenic treatment.
Oops! Sickle cell disease is most prevailant in populations at significant risk from malaria, by far a worse disease. Turns out that carriers of the gene are at a reduced risk of dying from malaria infections due to the special properties of the sickle cells. So what, you may well ask.
Here's a scenario. In this century, private genetic modification of offspring becomes popular in the United States. By near universal demand, the undesired sickle cell gene is systematically erradicated as standard in embryo selections, genetic screenings, what have you. All fine and dandy so far. People have stopped pissing in the pool.
Then, in the following century, the world temperature increases by, say 2 degrees. The air becomes more humid, and the overall climate becomes more amienable to malaria carrying mosquitos and the like. Malaria spreads like wildfire throughout the country.
Suddenly, the population in the US has, though its own genetic cleansing, lost a huge percentage of its potential sickle cell carrying population, and hence is less malaria resistant. This is obviously a problem. What's more, there is now a much reduced chance of the available sickle cell genes in the pool to evolve into a more successful anti-malaria measures. Future generations of US citizen continue to suffer the effects of this blunder for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
What makes a gene good? What makes one bad? Who decides this? Are "autistic" genes bad? Are "blue eye" genes good? Are genes that make us "smarter" good? Are genes that make us more "musical" good? Who decides? Who is qualified to decide? Who can predict the future?
Answer: No one. The most efficient way for the gene pool to adapt to best fit future circumstances, is by random searches in present circumstances. The world is ever changing, and good and bad are subjective terms, especially when applied to genes. Any nation that allows or even encourages widescale genetic engineering of offspring will quickly end up with a stagnant gene pool. Probably within 2 or three generations. It would be that fast.
Countries with stagnant gene pools can expect homogenous populations, devoid of diversity, prone to to pandemics, lacking impetus for change or innovation, and lacking specialist skills in a variety of areas. Countries which rely on good old random mutation on the other hand, will have healthy, diverse, adaptable populations, that are more ready for changes in their environment
If you stop people pissing in the pool, your kids will all grow up with allergies.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining.
Coal contains on average 3ppm uranium.
By comparision ordinary soil contains 1.8-5ppm uranium.
Coal fueled power plants have aerosol filters. Fields, roads, deserts, and lawns do not.
Could people please stop perpetuating this idea that coal is radioactive please. Coal is a kinematic and chemical pollutant, not a radioactive one. Unless you consider your breakfast cereal to be radioactive.
If we want to preferentialy breed inteligence into future generations we're going to have to do it intentionaly, either by a direct process of eugenics (possibly by giving financial benefits to inteligent people who have children and heavily taxing less inteligent people who do ...
Didn't you RTFA? The microcephaly genes responisble for larger brain size have independantly evolved in seperate populations. Evolution is already taking care of human intelligence.
While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
No. No. No. Eugenics is not just wrong. It's painfully stupid.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Randomness is the process which drives evolution. The universe is a vast, unpredicable chaotic system. It is only by randomly searching through many possible solutions that a species can hope to adapt to any enviornment.
The minute you take out randomness, by taking away genes or introducing them, you've stopped evolving, and have started specialising. And guess what happens to specialist species when their enviornment changes? That's right. They die.
Evolve dolphins with bigger lungs so they can dive deeper, kill off all lesser lunged dolphins. Then earths 02 levels drop by 2%. Ooops. Specialised, deep sea feeding dolphins are dead meat. With a random system, there would still be some lower lung capacity dolphins around.
Think this doesn't apply to people? Ask yourself this? Can you say with certainty what genes will be beneficial or detrimental to humanities survival in 1 million years time? What about 10,00 years time? 100 years? 10 years? Who would have predicted even 20 years ago that "geek" traits would be in such demand? Can you say what genes are beneficial or detrimental right now!?
Yet you want to throw out the single most powerful aspect of evolution. Random chance. It's got us where we are today, and if you think anyone can engineer an entire planet and its ecosystem half as well as random evolution, I'd like to see you try.
For an example of the superiority of evolution over engineering, just check out evolved antennas. NASA seems to think random evolution is just fine.
see, once an organism has reproduced and passed on it's genes, it no longer has a genetic "need" to stay alive.
...rather like monarchies now that I think of it.
Very, very true. A friend of mine is working with genetic algorithims. His original attitude was that the fittest solutions from every generation should be allowed to propagate forever. No death due to age.
I managed to persuade him that this was a bad idea, because if a freak, unoptimal solution produced locally optimal results, the population would tend towards only locally optimal solutions, not global ones. The freak chances would hold onto their personally lucrative solutions forever, to the detrement of the entire population....
What are the side effects of this science on religon and religous tradition?
The religious leaders at the pulpit look like fools and their flocks' doubt begins to spread to other areas of teaching like those on sociological pecking order, sin, sexuality, charity, etc, etc...
Most leaders are, somewhat understandably, thrown into a state of panic as their consequent status is severly reduced. They tend to resort to extreme measure as a result. Hence Intelligent Design and Televangelism.
Some people lead long, healthy active lives and never reproduce through choice, lack of opportunity or possibly just inadequate social skills. Isaac Newton famously died a virgin.
Precisely. And yet Newton undoubtedly had an effect on the general society around him, not least through his work in the mint. The overall population benefited from his labours, although he never himself returned his genes to the general pool.
Lets say, as is generally thought, that Newton had genes which gave him an extreme "geek" factor. This factor benefits the general populace, although the "geek" genes themselves may never be passed on directly. However, the potential for such genes to be expressed is passed on through, for example, Newton's siblings and close relatives.
Evolution works on a macro population level, not just on an individual organisim by organism basis.
One generation is enough. I know someone who was born with six fingers and toes. They were aputated, but the genetic propensity to grow the appendages is still there somehow.
Genetics probably isn't as discrete as that, but certainly the genes like microcephaly genes discussed in the article can and do turn on and off from generation to generation according to randomness.
Almost Identical eh? That's a pretty misleading statement. Even Joe Sixpack will call bull. He won't be too far wrong.
There a little thing called Chaos Theory. Without getting into details, what it means is, even the slightest change in the initial state of a chaotic system can lead to vastly different results, and the differences will grow as the system evolves.
What's more, complex unpredicable properties will emerge as the system evolves further. Order of a kind may emerge, but only on a general level. Locally, a chaotic system is usually completely unpredicable from the initial variables.
Basically, over time, the system just changes too much to keep track of. None of this is anything Joe Sixpack couldn't have told you anyway, albiet phrased differently, and only when he was inclined and sober, or possibly drunk.
So when you say that one genome is "Almost Identical" to another, that's pretty misleading. Phenotype maturation is undoubtedly a chaotic process in the initial stages, and observe the differences (and similarities) between individual people, let alone different species.
So a mouse genotype might be "Almost Identical" to a humans, but don't expect the end phenotype to be in any way human looking with even 98% genotype "similarity". Unless you consider chimpanzees to be human looking.
Yes it does take several objects to read and write a file, but then you have complete control over HOW the file is being read and written, including inserting your own filter classes.
If you have to go to such trouble, why did you leave C++ in the first place?
Java is a language designed for people who already know how to program. It starts off, from day one, with object orientation concepts, scope, namespaces, system calls, and in some Hello world cases, typecasting. All this verses a one liner in other languages.
Using Java as a teaching language is a recipe for disaster. Students won't grok it, will abuse its framework, and come away with a totally backwards understanding of how programming works. That is if they don't walk away in disgust at the first example.
Showing someone Java's "Hello World" as their first program is an insult every andragogical principle ever written. It's a personal insult to each and every student in the class, and a clear indicator of the incompetance and/or disinterest of the educator.
They have no concept as to what goes on under the covers. What it means when I go and create 1000's of strings. Or what it means to have a Hash Table vs a Stack, etc.
An important point to note here, is that most programmers nowadays don't need to be aware of this. At least not to the extent they used to.
More and more, business and industry needs software to simply automate simple tasks. As processing power increases, as memory space grows, it's not necessarily the case that the basic tasks people need done will grow to match them. Thus it becomes less important for a programmer to optimise or worry about optimisation.
In addition, although more programmers will be required to create software, they will not be required to delve into programmings basic complexities. It's not required you know about opcodes and memory addresses to write HTML, and soon it will be th ecase that you won't need to know when coding business apps. At all.
In short, the future legions of greasemonkey coders will be using Ruby on Rails, not C and FORTRAN. When the job gets too big, complex and nasty for them or a hardware upgrade to handle, they'll call in the high priced consultants who can still code in low level procedural languages.
Not C++; you'd be much better off with Java than C++.
Because? What makes Java a better language for beginners?
Let's stop referring to it as a programming language too, please.
I sympathise with your sentiments, but VB is a turing machine just like all the rest of them