My thought was if they are celebrating 40 years of x86, HOW THE HELL are they talking about patents? Overall the term of any patent dating 40 years ago should be long gone.

Before I get jumped on, yes they could be talking about certain parts of it added on later, but still it was strange seeing sword rattling like that on a document celebrating 40 year old tech.

Just because you get to the end of what silicone can do also doesn't mean another tech doesn't take over from that point, either.

I read one interesting posit that said that if you consider the *processing* part of Moore's law only that our ability to calculate as a speces has been following Moore's Law for thousands of years. Silicone wafers took over at the limits of paper and pencil, by hand calculation.

Neither is sugar. But try eating 200 pounds at one siting and see how well it turns out.

Better than purposefully misunderstanding all problems?

This would be a fine answer if it wasn't for the fact that the world only needs a finite number of tractors.

The idea of economies is supposed to be something that helps a maximized number of people to get their basic needs. This type of statement is putting the importance of capitalism before the basic importance of providing people to live. Not to mention it's an attempt to purposefully misunderstand why the current wave of change is different than the previous changes like the industrial revolution.

Your whole argument is a false dilemma. There are plenty of steps between capitalism and communism. Plus that continuum isn't probably real either.

Point missed. What jobs will it make the labor available for? High-end jobs only this time. One of the saving graces of the industrial revolution is that it required more warm bodies than it required skilled labor.

Not to mention that the post-WWII boom was at least partially due to the investments the US made in its people, especially through instruments like the GI Bill. A lot of that was paid by taxes on the upper-income brackets. We have a government culture where policy is set by the highest bidder and proper taxation is nearly impossible because of it. Tax the rich (not even at post-WWII which were arguably too high) and actually fix our infrastructure and we have a good start at makeing the landing a little softer.

Because education isn't something you poor into someone's ear and suddenly they are skilled.

Not everyone can be an engineer, doctor, or even a programmer as far as that is worth. Some people can not benefit from training.

This problem was written elegantly a long time ago by Kurt Vonnegut in "Player Piano".

Technology doesn't stand still.

How hard will it be to teach a manufacturing robot to replace a circuit board?

No, but we need to do better than the Right's drumbeat of "only the lazy don't have jobs". If we continue to worship corporatism and capitalism we could end up with large numbers people starving because they aren't capable of getting the education and skills they need to get a job. That's a significant number of people.

The President shouldn't be on Slashdot OR Twitter.

In other words, you are an unethical douche.

There are other things you can comment on like above, but I there are other ways this can go wrong as well.

I have been diagnosed with bad eczema on my hands recently, and it mostly affects the tips of my fingers. The sensor on my Nexus will now periodically stop accepting my fingerprint scans until I log in with another authentication method and rescan them.

If you don't have any backup ways to provide authentication there are cases where people will get locked out for medical reasons. That won't be extremely common I guess, but fingerprint biometric will, like all systems, not solve all problems.