Even if you can get the pesky feds away, and pay them less than minimum wage, lazy, entitled, human workers still tend to waste 4-8 hours/day 'sleeping' and engaging in rudimentary grooming behaviors; and their lack of work ethic means that if you try to pay them starvation wages they may just decide to go starve somewhere else, and at least work fewer hours while doing so.

The effect is most obvious in places where automation is ridiculously efficient(it's pretty tricky for even your most downtrodden human to be cheap enough to stuff PCBs more efficiently than a pick-and-place, for instance); but it's true across the board that no matter how hard you beat them down, humans still have a price floor. Even slaves aren't necessarily cheaper than robots.

American aerospace contractors are displeased to note that NASA plans to have the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle fabbed on a 20nm process by TSMC, rather than more traditional launch partners...

Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

I'm certainly not going to argue with you there; though I will wonder how you can content yourself with an observation about where an opinion was born, rather than how accurate it is...

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

You won't know if it's first until it's observed.... and it's not :(

Remember back when Uber's big privacy problem was 'God View?

Well, they promised to cut back their sleazebag executives' personal access to that. They might even have been not-lying. Unfortunately, that just meant that they were growing up, and moving into the big-kid leagues of privacy violation. As I said then:

"So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.

That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed."

Well, there we are: 'turning into a big data company' is pretty much the thermonuclear option when it comes to customer privacy; more or less the most invasive thing we yet have the technology to make cost effective. It'll take some real innovating for them to dig deeper.

Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?

I apologize if this was explained in TFA and I missed it; but I was left wondering why gallium arsenide would be so dramatically expensive. A quick look shows that even the scammers selling 'gallium bullion' in small quantities are charging under a dollar a gram for the stuff(at allegedly very high purity); and arsenic certainly isn't terribly pricey. Silicon, of course, is really abundant, and still fairly cheap once you've coaxed the oxygen out of the quartz-form you typically find it in; but not lower cost enough to explain a wafer-level difference as large as the one that exists.

Are gallium, arsenic, or both markedly more difficult to purify enough to serve as reliable semiconductors? Is growing sufficiently flawless crystals large enough to be cut into wafers too error prone to get good yields? Some other unpleasant aspect of processing or handling the material?

People who react badly to having their precious little feelings hurt rarely improve through being carefully coddled and pandered to. If anything, they tend to reach the (fairly sensible, if everyone is busy justifying it) conclusion that threatening violence is an effective way to get what you want; which encourages them to push for additional concessions. And there is always something else on the list, even if you agree to everything initially demanded of you.

This is not to say that the exercise of free speech is a risk-free activity that has never been the (proximate) cause of a nasty flare-up between the opinionated assholes of history; such a claim would be trivially false: some of history's arguments have gotten downright ghastly. It's just that situations that need only a little talk to turn violent tend not to be ones that were in the process of just simmering down and solving themselves until those pesky free speech absolutists came in and ruined things. Rather, such situations are usually festering merrily away, just looking for an excuse. That's the main reason why it's so easy for trivial slights, sometimes even ones that were merely rumored to have been committed; with no solid evidence of anything actually having happened(see also: witch hunts, lynch mobs) to set them off: They want a reason, any reason, doesn't really matter much if it's any good or not, for some good, cathartic, violence.

India has had its share of moderately nasty mob violence along sectarian lines; and probably hasn't seen the last of it. Is it possible that somebody's inflammatory comment/video/whatever will be the proximate cause of another bout? Sure, totally plausible. Will it be the actual cause; or will criminalizing saying mean things on the internet to anything useful to address the underlying tensions or prevent some other, equally spurious, incident from kicking off the violence instead? Not very likely.

It isn't every day that you see a law that would make posting a copy of itself online a punishable act...

Per a spokesweasel(in TFA): "Some academic research uses proliferation-sensitive controlled goods and technologies. While the sensitive items are used for legitimate civilian research by Australian researchers, they can also be used for the proliferation of military, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. "

Notice anything odd? The word 'military' shows up along the usual trio of "nuclear, chemical, biological". Last I checked, the boundaries of 'military weapons' were very, very, broad, running the gamut from fancy-nuclear-power aerospace widgetry to relatively crude hand-fabricated small arms more or less loosely based on designs dating back to the first half of the 20th century, if not older.

Is there some stricter definition of 'military weapons' that makes this slightly less ridiculous, or are they in fact export-controlling basically any tech you could conceivably integrate into a weapon in some fashion, including weapons already extremely widely available, adequately functional with downright crude technology, and otherwise utterly absurd to pretend are still within the reach of counter-proliferation efforts?

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.