Based on my (layman's) reading of CDC data from the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report; it would appear that we may have settled on a solution for the middle aged and surplus.

It's just not a terribly nice solution.

Isn't a corporation a robot that exists specifically to hold assets? Some of them are better at being rich than others; but surely a corporation that owns the expert system that runs the corporation would be a rich robot; were it successful...

Depends on the political climate: if some bleeding heart is calling the shots, sure; but if it's tough-on-crime time, then the rapidly maturing world of combat robotics will be tapped to provide low-cost 'treatment' solutions to these populations.

'Real' empathy would require a strong AI, more or less by definition(and a relatively human-like strong AI at that). Conveniently, though, there's no externally visible difference between real and fake empathy, and faking it is on the level of passing a Turing test, which is hardly trivial; but likely to actually happen in the comparatively near future.

The best diagnosticians might actually be the ones who see the chopping block sooner. Traversing decision trees, crunching patient statistics, and doing machine vision on whatever comes back from radiology and histology are all things that computers are either already good at or improving and plausibly expected to continue to do so at a reasonable clip. "Getting a patient's report of their symptoms and making them feel as though they've been duly listened to" or "calming some screaming brat long enough to innoculate it" are not things computers are terribly promising at. However, they are things that can be done, even done well, by basically the cheapest category of went-to-less-school-than-the-doctor-or-some-of-the-fancier-types-of-nurse medical workers you can legally get away with using for the task. Somebody will still have to do medical research; and it'll likely take a while for the public to accept that ResectXact(tm) software is a better candidate than some well-reputed surgeon to chop them open and do some maintenance; but attrition is likely to be brutal among the relatively expensive people whose specialized skills are amenable to expert systems and whose bedside manner and basic patient interaction are no better than a much, much, cheaper nurse or tech of some flavor.

Lawyers, in the same way, are going to require some people who are sharp enough to not fail during oral argument, who know how to work a jury, who can project a besuited air of consummate professionalism when dealing with clients who are paying well for the services of Somebody, Somebody, and That Other Guy; but it's hard to imagine that humans are going to last long against glorified search engines when it comes to "Traverse the entire law code and case law, give me the top hits, flag anything from things that the presiding judge has cited in decisions he has written in the past". Until computer generated text stops sounding so much like markov chain word salad, they'll probably still need some peons to stitch things together; but that will be a dead-end, unbearably soul crushing paralegal sweatshop of misery, not even an entry level job.

The one major complication to keep in mind is that robots/automation almost never literally 'replace' you. Rather, they allow for a different way of doing things that no longer requires you.

Robots built to replicate human capabilities are, despite continued effort, relatively pitiful. Competent bipedal locomotion, a couple of dexterous hands, fallible but very, very, adaptable image recognition, etc. are a fairly tricky package to put together on a reasonable budget. Outside of tech demos, that's why you don't bother to build the robot to resemble the worker, you restructure the task to play to the strengths of the robot(see basically all contemporary manufacturing processes). This task restructuring can also involve the user: replacing a telephone operator, say, would have been impossible until relatively recently; you need speech recognition software good enough to do the job and computers cheap enough to run it. So we didn't: Pulse code dialing allows line switching to be done with relatively simple electromechanical devices, which is why operators were on their way toward the exit more than a century ago, despite AVR 'agents' still being considered lousy and terrible to work with today.

You will almost always be misled if you try to predict odds of replacement based on 'what the job requires' rather than 'what the job produces'. Beating the people currently doing a job at the skills that the job requires is difficult, frequently impossible or uneconomic. Achieving whatever goal their job exists to fulfill(or achieving something else that eliminates that goal); is almost always how it gets done.

Yeah. That patent has no patent term adjustment, as I said.

Hmm, my mistake - the ramjet does appear to predate Doctor Bussard considerably - clearly my avionics history is lacking.

On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke credits "L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune" (1657) as both being the first example of rocket-powered space flight and for inventing the ramjet. Though I would imagine they probably discussed something similar to a conventional ramjet, fusion having not yet been imagined. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet#Cyrano_de_Bergerac)

No, it's been shown that one particular hypothetical design based on one particular set of assumptions would not be viable. Not that the fundamental concept is flawed. There's a post a few pages up that gives more details.

No, I'm pretty sure it's the other way around - there's now a real jet which adopted the name of a theoretical fusion engine that had been designed decades before.

Here's a bit on the first commercial shape-memory alloy with a fair bit explaining how they are driven by phase transformations - cool stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium

Actually the magic here is we can do stuff like this far better than we used to be able to do 50 years ago.

That's not relevant since the original photographer didn't sell the rights while John Fogerty did.
Stupid situation and an abuse of the legal system - yes.
The same thing - no.

It's no big surprise to see even something like a phone box in a major art gallery :)
http://cleowho.tumblr.com/post...

They were not paid their promised severance pay.
Many posters here of the Libertarian bent for some reason think they should have just rolled over and given up "for the greater good", which is very funny because if it happened to them personally they would be demanding their rights as an individual.