So with the manual labour jobs being given to robots, and a distinct lack of young women, (thanks to female babies being unwanted) things are certainly looking bright for the tens of millions of young Chinese males.

I'm sure they'll take it philosophically - enormous gangs of angry, sexually frustrated young men usually do.

A small correction, Nvidia Quadro has not "turned into the Titan". Quadro cards are largely the same hardware as the consumer cards, but with minor changes to enable certain features. The main difference is in the drivers. Consumer drivers err on the side of speed, whereas Quadro drivers will typically have lower performance in a game type situation, but be better suited for CAD / 3D work.

I agree with you, the variance of the distribution is such to make the difference in mean IQ utterly meaningless on an individual basis. It must be incredibly frustrating to an intelligent black man to have that average working unfairly against him.

If you think that's bad though, imagine a world where it is easy to determine the average IQ of a black man from Baltimore, with a dead father,and who drives a car more than 8 years old. Now imagine coming from such a background, and being a great computer programmer. Now imagine the sinking feeling as you're handed a demographic form upon arriving for an interview for a coding job you could do well.

A life under the tyranny of statistics could be a hard life indeed, if we're not careful.

Let me know how the million-webgamer march goes.

That's the problem. Modern society has decided to act as if every race is equal, and also decided that for the sake of us all getting along, we won't look too closely at whether this is in fact the case, because history shows that going down that road doesn't tend to end well. So far so good, but what happens when the differences (and there are bound to be some) between various groups can be highlighted by a data-mining algorithm, and are in everyone's face? Answer: Trouble.

"France fails at having an Internationally competitive workforce."

Good for them. In the race to the bottom, France's "failure" sounds more fun than being the winner.

I don't think opinions on this sort of subject are all that amenable to change. Obama looked at the numbers, and said what he thought would help him stay in office.

A lot of chest beating going on here, a lot of flexing of consumer muscles, and talk of the righteous boycotting of bigots. From the outside however, it just looks like a pitchfork wielding mob, using coercion to bend a third party to their will.
People don't like seeing coercion, especially by groups who have no accountability to anyone, and I believe that the result of these protests will be a decrease in public's sympathy for equality of rights for gay people.

I think it's likely that Zuckerberg knows that Facebook is preposterously overvalued, that the market will realise this, and is diversifying into some other areas with massive future growth while the going is good. Perhaps they'll create a virtual world communication type thing. I don't think this is too bad a development.

I suppose some people are so unwilling to take the time to learn, or to do something properly, that there's always a ready market for a stupid device to make it "easier". It doesn't work. What do a load of flashing LEDs, (controlled by a smartphone, what else) add beyond what printed chord charts, or guitar tab provide? It's exactly the same information.

Instead, why not spend that $400 on an acoustic guitar (you can get a really good one for that money), and practice putting your fingers on the right strings and frets, forming the chords, practice picking or strumming, and KEEP DOING IT, again and again, every day until you can form the shapes instantly. Your brain will learn, and your fingers will get sore, but that goes away. It takes time, but at the end you've learned a real skill. Imagine how proud you'll feel, you've got that skill for life - the ability to play songs, entertain friends. It's well worth the effort.

Don't piss about with some gadget that promises to let you skip all the hard work. They don't work, never have and never will.

That is *A* solution, but not a very good one. Why don't we reduce the human population to zero, and completely solve the problem?

No one has tried such a thing - indeed it wouldn't work today. You missed this section of my post:

"once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies"

The time will come when machines can organise things better than people can. That's already the case in some situations, and it will become more and more common (as in the frequently referenced "Manna" story, by Marshall Brain). When this happens, a lot of the population will not be economically useful. As in, way more than half. At the same time, production efficiency will be high enough that they could be supported to an ever higher standard. I'm suggesting that that ought to happen.

Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).

The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?

I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.

As you say, headers are useful when using libraries. But why not have the compiler generate the headers itself, or perhaps the library creation utility? IMHO if something is a deterministic one to one copy of something else, then there's no reason to force a human to copy it out by hand.

I don't disagree with you that we will ultimately be better off as a society - but to get there, we'll need to rethink some basic tenets of society. Fewer people will be economic contributors. The social safety net, which has steadily expanded over the last hundred years, will need to expand much more. However, hopefully the enhanced production that new technology allows will enable us to afford it.