Yes. The next step is to ask whether we can get close enough to the ideal to have something more useful than present day labor markets? I believe we can do that.

I noticed that too although they're usually not the people with those expectations. I also notice that they're usually right when they make that observation.

As has been pointed out in the past, somehow this trend towards greater automation hasn't resulted in human capital getting cheaper over the long run except in the places that have been discouraging the use of human labor such as the developed world.

You can turn that question around. Given the manifest possibility of such a act, why haven't more organizations taken steps to prevent them?

We keep hearing from the companies attacked and the press that these attacks are "sophisticated", but this attack started with a simple spear phishing attack. People use "sophisticated" to mean "more trouble than we were prepared for."

Comparisons to Stuxnet seem overblown and (in some cases) self-serving. Stuxnet was designed to undermine systems the perpetrator had no access to; it would work even if the administrators of the target system successfully locked the attacker out. In this case the administrator failed to secure the network from the attacker.

Not every persistent threat is an advanced one.

Because they're not "just feeding their family and keeping a roof over their heads"?

At least in the US, what we call "poor" are ridiculously well off by current world standards, and even very comfortable compared to relatively recent US norms. US "poor" typically have cell phones multiple tv's, computers, car(s) and a residence larger than middle class Europeans.
http://www.heritage.org/resear...

Living a life that would have comfortable in the 1970s - 1 cheap tv, no cable, no computer/internet, one cheapo car, no cell phone, smaller meal sizes, no convenience food - you could have a family of 4 right at the poverty line with out much trouble.

Those parts are bigger than the output. The highest force is applied to the output, not the ratcheting mechanism, because the output is of lesser diameter.

I recently broke a Craftsman 1/2" to 3/8" socket drive adapter by breaking off the 3/8 drive nub, but it took a cheater bar to supply sufficient force.

Pretty much all of them. At best, you can lose a batch of something if the process fails in the middle. If Sunsweet loses power in the middle of cooking a batch of fruit paste, the batch not only fails and has to be trashed but cleaning the system is far more difficult than if the batch succeeds. At the point where factories become complex enough to need digital automation, you cannot reasonably create a failsafe mechanism which will prevent an error from losing a batch. The best you can hope for in some situations, probably most, is to create mechanical interlocks which will prevent immediately catastrophic combinations of inputs and outputs.

Not really.

Well ok, once we get to the point where that happens.

Ruby, Python, Node, and PHP are distinct, with distinct styles. C# and Java are so similar that you can forget which one you are looking at sometimes. The biggest difference in those languages on a day-to-day basis is remembering whether to capitalize the first character of your methods and variables.

That's a good point.

Everyone knows this. We know this because they paid a lot of money to Sun for violating their patents for such optimizations.

I understand a lot about optimization problems. An optimization problem with all the people and resources on earth isn't going to finish calculating any time soon.

Yeah that's actually true lol, I have no idea what you're talking about now. Quoting the Matrix now?

I mean, you can try going without working or eating. You are free to do that. You'll die of course, but not because 'society' is killing you, but because that's how nature is. The natural state is you have to work to stay alive. That's true with society or without.