Because in a world where 99% of the people are literally unemployable (because anything they can do, a robot can do better and cheaper), the alternatives are grim -- either mass starvation, or civil war.

Yes, I'm familiar with the standard conservative moralizing. But that approach only works in a world where those actions are possible, and in the scenario we are discussing, they won't be.

I never said it wasn't open source. My comment was about whether or not it's "locked to a single platform". I assert that without a herculean porting effort, it effectively is.

C'mon. Bridging API frameworks is where "it's at" today.

I'll believe it when I see it. I guess getting it to run under WINE might be doable, but then again that was equally doable (at least in principle) when the source was closed.

I'm not sure how sound that logic is. You might as well say that cars can't be any faster than their creators.

My computer is already smarter than me in certain ways; for example it can calculate a square root much faster than I can, it can beat me at chess, and it can translate English into Arabic better than I can. Of course we no longer think of those things as necessarily indicating intelligence, but that merely indicates that we did not in the past have a clear definition of what constitutes 'intelligence', and that we probably still don't. Meanwhile, every year our game of "No True Scotsman" whittles away our definition of "true intelligence" a bit more, until one day there's nothing left.

While your prediction is entirely valid, I'd like to point out that it won't be the robots causing the civil unrest, but rather society's (hopefully temporary) failure to adapt to a new economic model where workers are no longer required for most tasks.

Having menial labor done "for free" is actually a huge advantage for humanity -- the challenge will be coming up with a legal framework so that the fruits of all that free labor get distributed widely, and not just to the few people who own the robot workforce.

Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".

Same thing he usually does, I suppose... he'll just keep using whatever is currently installed on his PC, until one day he decides to buy a new PC, at which point he'll start using whatever OS was pre-installed on that one.

Right, because there won't be any upscale car-sharing companies that specialize in date-worthy automobiles. That could never happen, the free market wouldn't allow it!

I was thinking more along the lines of sending up an anti-drone drone to grab it and drag it back down. After that you can rely on the legal precedent of "finders, keepers" to add it to your drone collection.

I don't think having access to the source code to VS 2015 is going to allow anyone to compile VS for any non-Windows platform. Not unless you have a few million man-hours available for porting and redesign (since much of the functionality present in VS wouldn't even make sense outside of Windows)

The technical problems you mention have obvious solutions.

Not enough roof space on a high-rise to supply power to all of its residents? No problem, just put the solar panels somewhere else instead. Wires make it easy to move electricity from one place to another.

Need more power when the sun isn't shining? That's a bit more expensive to solve, but the solution is obvious -- generate excess power in advance and store it in batteries, so that it is available when you need it. The cell phone, laptop, tablet, and electric car markets are all driving the costs of battery storage down to the point where this will soon be economical to do at scale.

193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.

Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)

Of course in a non-corporate/general-email environment, all of those things won't happen (or at least, not all at the same time), so there is a big chicken-and-egg problem if we require all of that. Fortunately, I don't think we need to require all of that.

I don't think it is necessary to rely on an unauthenticated message being invalid. An unauthenticated message is just that -- unauthenticated. It might be valid or invalid. If it's something important, the "unauthenticated" flag is an indication to the user that he should verify the message's authenticity using other means (e.g. by calling the boss and asking him about it).

You wouldn't ignore it, you'd call the boss (or email him) and ask him if he really send the message you received.

And hopefully the boss would almost never "forget" to sign an email, because all of his emails would be automatically signed simply as part of the act of sending them from his regular email account.

True, you can't fix stupid. But you can at least make it easier for people to see a difference between a known-authentic email and an email of unproven origin.

It seems like relying solely on peoples' good judgement to figure out which emails are legitimate vs which ones are phishing spam (or worse, spear-phishing spam) is asking for trouble.

I can imagine email service providers using cryptographic signing techniques to assist the email client in reliably identifying which emails are definitely coming from their boss (or at least, from their boss's legitimate email account) vs which ones are unauthenticated and could have been written by anyone.

With that implemented, after a few weeks people would grow used to seeing the happy green "sender authenticated" sign at the top of each email from their boss, and if an email came in purporting to be from the boss, but with a big angry red "WARNING -- UNAUTHENTICATED MESSAGE -- MAY BE FRAUDULENT" (or whatever) sign at the top, they'd be less likely to hand over the company jewels without first confirming the email's validity.

Does something like this exist? If so, it seems like it's not widely used. If GMail/hotmail/yahoo could agree on a method and then start implementing it by default, I think that would go a long way towards reducing the effectiveness of email phishing attacks.

Which leads me to a question... if Intel were to one day do away with its old-timey segmented memory modes and what not, would anybody notice?

I'm a little surprised they haven't done so already. Even if the extra transistors required to support that aren't significant, there is still the matter of having to test, verify, and support all 27 different layers of compatibility for every CPU model they come out with. It seems like it would be a pain to do all that if nobody is using that functionality anyway.

They still let people use their brains at your work, eh? No such luck at my company, they threw all of those out years ago when they upgraded to PowerPoint.