That assumption is not borne out by history. If it were true, we should already have arrived at that point long ago, since it used to be that 95-98% of human labor was dedicated to agriculture, and the number is more like 2% today. How is it that anyone has work to do? We dramatically expanded some jobs and invented lots of new ones, many of which would be utterly baffling or even ludicrous to farmers of a few centuries ago. What will people do in the future to add value? If I knew that, I could undoubtedly make several fortunes. But what I do know is that they'll do something. Perhaps the economy will mostly be service-based, driven by peoples' desire to be served by people rather than machines. Perhaps much of it will be highly-specialized, custom-tailored creative manufacturing, producing one-off, hand-made items. Maybe a lot of it will be creative or artistic, a world of painters, storytellers, etc. Maybe it will mostly be about designing and rushing to market the next mass-produced faddish gewgaw (this seems very likely to me). Some of it will definitely be around the design, care and feeding of the robots, even if much of that work becomes robot-assisted.

What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.

That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).

His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labor to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital. Communism is inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since it lacks the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximize what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.

I'd say it's actually a little more complex than that. It depends not just on the source server but on every point between the source server and your machine. In the case of the Netflix/Comcast spat a while ago, for example, the problem wasn't Comcast's network, or Netflix, or the network between them, but Comcast's connection to the network between them -- so it was Comcast's fault, but not in a way that would show up with connections to other servers that took a different path.

And regardless of whether or not *you* blame YouTube when it's slow, many users do, which is why Google is doing this.

When the server at the other end is YouTube, it's not the server at the other end. Google has enormous capacity, both computing and bandwidth, and is extensively peered. But people do tend to blame the server, which is why Google is trying to make clear that it's not YouTube that's sucking when you have problems watching videos.

Jealous, much? Actually, I don't have Google Glass... but I'm hoping to get one for Christmas this year. Neener neener!

The first really successful smartphone -- the iPhone, released in 2007 -- has never had removable batteries. In fact, since I got my first smartphone, about five years ago, I've only had one that did have removable batteries (Galaxy Nexus), and I never found it a particularly useful feature. I did buy an extra battery but swapping batteries frequently is inconsistent with keeping a good case on it, so after breaking a phone I found it was better to just charge it whenever I was near a charger. My Moto X doesn't have a removable battery.

Better make it "No Cameras Allowed". Which, incidentally, also means "No Smartphones or Tablets Allowed", since they all have cameras... which would actually eliminate the risk of passwords being stolen as they're entered into a smartphone or tablet, since no smartphones or tablets are allowed. Problem solved!

Given the amount of inconvenience and expense this is going to create for millions of people, I'd say it takes at least one, and probably more than that. Being pro-active is good, but security measures have to be balanced against probability of deployment, effectiveness and the cost of prevention. It's not possible to defend against every form of destructive sabotage of aircraft, so we have to pick and choose, and focus on high priority threats.

Nonsense. The government continues recording detailed historical information, just as its predecessors did.

It seems to me that there are two approaches:

1. Try to hire people with the skills to do what you need. If you can find and hire them, they'll be productive quickly and your investment in them will be low. If they leave quickly, you're pretty much back where you were when you hired them, looking for someone to fill a specific role.

2. Try to hire people with native talent but not necessarily with specific skills. They won't be productive quickly, so you'll have to invest a bit in on-the-job training which may be formal or may just be a matter of letting them be less productive while they educate themselves. If they leave quickly, then you will lose a lot of that investment.

Both approaches are reasonable, and both can be effective. IMO, the very best companies go for option 2, then do the right things to retain them, but option 1 can be fine as well.

Whenever someone circles my corporate profile from the public G+, I send them a message explaining that I only use this for work, give them my public G+ profile (and generally circle them from it), and then block them from the corp profile.

I actually don't find it difficult at all to avoid posting publicly from my corporate profile. It seems to me that the G+ UI makes that very clear.

They'll want to pay?

Cite?

Based on what I found, that seems to be a pretty serious mischaracterization. First, "successfully sued" normally implies that the suit has reached some sort of conclusion, but from what I can see all that's been successful is the filing. Google has made a motion to dismiss which hasn't been ruled on, AFAICT. Even if that motion fails, it just means that the judge doesn't think the suit is so ridiculous it should be tossed without a further look. That's a long way from saying it actually has merit. Second, all Google said was that ads were turned off for edu accounts by default. Plaintiffs allege that Google still uses the data in other ways, but I don't see that there is any evidence about that one way or another.

+1

Clearly human behavior lies along a continuum, some people are more extroverted and some are more introverted. So it seems quite expected that if you're drawing a line you should locate it so that half of the people are on each side.