And in any case, they won't merge today's mac with today's iPhone. Who know where technology is going. The increase in performance between generation of tablet/phone is very big. On the computer side, no so much. Graphical work still need fantasy power, and the rest of creative work has not really improved much since the SSD became mainstream.

If /. reader where 20 years older they would probably claim that making a server OS for those rubbish Personal Computer is stupid when real men run an IBM Mainframe.

Well it seems that Samsung finally managed to copy Apple Reality Distortion field.

A screen, curved like my hands, I need one now.

It would have help in seeing the shitstorm sooner, to some extend, but what were really their options ? It is nice to see that you are in a bubble but you still need to live somewhere and you need to pay market price. The housing bubble has lasted 2 decades - or the time it takes to get out of school, have girlfriend, marry, have kids and see them enter university.

Even if you are a pacifist, when your country is going to war you can get caught in the crossfire.

Most companies cannot really evaluate people. They don't know the value of the people they employ. Bonus are given based on the success of the project you are working on and external sign of failure of you direct colleague. Deep down, bean counter know that. They know that if they are going to cherry-pick people, at best they will fire random people.

Also, when you pay executive hundred of times the salary of regular employee, at some point you start to believe they are worth it. With a team of rockstars like that, why would you care about relative performance of cheapo employee ?

For once that will be very easy to check. We are not talking about prediction but daily reality: people are losing their job now, so it won't take long to see who is right and who is wrong.

That said both the examples in the article "Luddites are wrong" and the "industrial revolution" were successful technological revolution. However, there is a huge difference. In "Luddite are wrong", there is a smooth transition from old job to new job. Not such much with the industrial one. Although it will prove to be a long term good for humanity, it has been a (long) period of intense misery for the majority of the population.

Considering that is a scenario people look up too, I don't want to imagine the pain society will be in if the luddite are not wrong.

You are spinning it the other way. Regulation are also costing them. I'm sure lot of hotel would be fine just not having those pesky regulation getting in the way (like you know fire protection, hygiene, using legit employees, insurances, ...)

Same advice as always in the US: don't be unlucky.

The article point is that in those specific sector where automation has happened, more jobs of the same skill level in the same sector (in the US) have been created. That is interesting, and that certainly answer some the question like why the unemployment in the US is not worse.

That said, the author is victim of cherry-picking. Sure there are sectors where it all worked out, but there are many others where it didn't ( like your example, or any job that has been outsourced ) Also salary level are not taken into account as GGP points out.

The fact that you need training and education in your own time is not a problem per se. The problem is that by the time you realise that you need those you are probably already in a situation where you do not have the freedom to chose. You need to make career prediction years in advance in order to pull that off, the only way Wall Street analyst managed to do that from time to time is by being in bed with the government to influence the economic polities of the country. That does (Not even considering that minimum wage in the US would not allow you any freedom to train even if you are lucky at predicting the market)

I assume you mean me as "we the internet users". In that case, we want the content of the content provider, they just won't give it to us without DRM. So our choice is either, keep getting the content with DRM like we do now using the content provider chosen technology, or make a DRM standard and beg content provider to be kind enough to support it.

Amazing how /. technical elite become downright ultra-conservative assholes when traditional subject are concerned. Your post and many others would be the equivalent telling a woman in the 80's that there is no reason she would need a micro-wave if she cannot take the time to cook properly for her family.

There are plenty of cases where a parent is legitimately separated from his kid:
1. divorce: my wife is from a different country - if we divorce and she goes back closer to her family, it would take me at the very least several months to sort things out. My case is easy tough, I can consider moving at all. There are cases where it is simply not easy legally (Australia - UK is already a problem and that's an easy one culturaly, what about China / Russia / Japan) What stuff preventing the guy to move like uninteresting resume, lack of skills.
2. he is deployed, a sailor, or anybody that needs to be months away from home. Maybe he wasn't 4 years ago. Crisis man.
3. crisis. I have friends (with older child) that have had to take work several hundred miles away from home. People hit by the crisis are not the kind that can afford a personal jet for commuting. Moving a family to a new city to follow an unreliable jobs can be expensive and almost as bad for the kids. Not even considering that the kid could have health issue or other specific needs making it even harder to move.
4. shit happens. I known/heard of people being separated for tons of shitty issues like health reasons, legal problems, visa problem.

The reason there used to be no reason for a 4 year old to have a mobile in those situation was because it was socially acceptable to not interact with your kid in those conditions. I have never seen anybody suggesting that we should make a law prohibiting soldier, sailor to have a family for example. There is a possibility this guy is just trying to do better than what society is expecting him to. That is also his fucking right not to expose all the details of his potentially shitty situation.

I guess the screen limitation is to blame. Prior to 2007, expectation for touch screen were quite low. (single touch, resistive, only gesture supported is "tap").

More like Nokia was out of steam and looking for a buyer. If Microsoft didn't buy it they could have ended up being bought by somebody less sympathetic to Windows Phone leaving MS in a seriously bad spot on the mobile market.

No need for rumor. It was either buy Nokia and keep some chance of fighting against Apple, Samsung, Google or quit the mobile market.

It can also be that sapphire glass is pretty much standard. Quality watches have had those for decades. Also they already use it for the lens of the camera.

Good thing is that it will deprecate Guava. Because young developers like their guava (for loops are fashion faux-pas nowadays), but it looks clunky compared to real support in the language.

Apple has also very often been left alone in the premium market. That is not the case in smartphone. Also, Apple has made cheaper version of their premium line before: macbook vs macbook pro, mac mini vs macpro, a whole range of price in iPod.

That is a difficult line to walk. Apple need some volume yet not dilute itself. Until now, Apple was solving that issue by discounting older product giving them in effect a low cost range. The problem with that previous approach is that it killed Apple capacity to change across its product range (for example introducing new screen size and connector) and could only compete year to year with its top of the range only.

The iPhone 5C changes that. Not to say it will succeed, but on paper it does not seem like a revolutionary rush move.