Bitcoin mining moved to ASICs years ago. Mining on GPUs is not cost effective.

I would trust the robot more than I would a human pharmacist. Computers tend to be pretty good at reading barcodes.

All a GP does to diagnose a problem is follow a flowchart. It is mostly memorized, but there is no reason that it couldn't be computerized, or even printed on paper. A nurse with a checklist implemented as an iPad app could probably diagnose most problems just as well as a doctor.

That will happen in the beginning. But as people become comfortable with automation, it will be dropped. Would I fly in a pilotless plane today? Nope. But once they have flown 100,000 flights without any incidents, then sure. Most aircraft accidents involve pilot error, so once the bugs are worked out, the pilotless planes should be safer.

I felt tomorrowland was kind of a crap sandwich.

It had a confusing sucky start- a decent not terrible not awesome movie with some cool visuals in the middle- and the a stupid pointless tacked on kid's movie ending.

I saw Tomorrowland. It sucked. The plot made no sense, and most of the special effects were pointless (other than helping to keep the audience awake). The moralizing "everyone should feel guilty" ending was anti-climactic. I am happy to hear that it is bombing, and I regret seeing it.

That involves much more risk than a quick snatch-and-grab mugging. You will be with the mark for much longer, meaning more time to get noticed, and ATMs have cameras. You will likely need a weapon to intimidate the mark, meaning a longer prison sentence if caught. For what, maybe $300?

A simple cost-benefit analysis shows why this type of crime is rare.

Some things that used to take a human no longer do. For instance, image recognition has improved a lot in recent years. Banks use computers to read and process handwritten checks because they make fewer errors than humans do.

Yes, very long. But a solar mass black hole would have a temperature of 60 nano-Kelvins, and would emit 1e-30 watts. If you used all the emitted energy from the black hole to charge a AA battery, many of the protons in the battery might decay before it is fully charged (assuming protons have a half-life of ~1e33 years, which has not been experimentally verified).

No, it is because mugging pays better than the available alternatives ... except it mostly doesn't, which is why muggings have drastically declined over the last few decades. Today, people carry credit or debit cards instead of cash, and used cellphones aren't worth much.

Yes. You should read Freakonomics. It is a superb book, and in one chapter he explains the economics of crime. Teenagers selling crack on street corners were making $3 an hour. Many of them asked the researcher if he could get them a "good job" as a janitor at the university. I think many criminals would be glad to flip burgers if such jobs were available in their neighborhoods.

If the other crime paid, then another criminal would already be doing it. Expertise in one type of crime doesn't automatically help in other crimes. For instance, burglary skills are of little use to a Wall Street investment banker.

No. Most crime is based on opportunity. More opportunities means more crime. Fewer opportunities means less crime.

There is not a fixed number of criminals, nor a fixed amount of crime. If crime doesn't pay, potential criminals will do something else, and as crime in an area falls, businesses invest and other job opportunities tend to open up.

Only within limits. Think of human ignorance as a doughnut. It is shrinking because the "hole" of things we are learning to do is expanding. But it is also shrinking from the outside as we learn more and more things that are impossible to do. The more human knowledge grows, the more confirmation there is that some things, such as faster than light travel, reversing entropy, etc. are fundamentally impossible.

Yes, but very slowly. A black hole of one solar mass would take about 2e67 years to evaporate through Hawking radiation. The time to evaporate goes up as the cube of the mass, and some black holes are 10 billion solar masses, so they would take more than 1e97 years to evaporate.

Any current black hole with a mass larger than earth's moon would actually be growing, since the cosmic microwave background being absorbed is more than the Hawking radiation being emitted. They will not start to shrink until the universe cools off and the CMB dissipates, far in the future.

If it fails, part of the failure can be attributed to John Oliver.

That guy has done more to clean up government in 2 years on HBO than most politicians do in a 2 decades in office.