Correlation does not PROVE causation. It can however strongly imply causation, especially as we can plainly see and infer the other mechanisms at play here. Let's not be like the cigarette companies here and turn a blind eye to the likely health dangers with misdirection. As for sample bias, when you are 110 for 111 I don't care what your bias is, the likelihood is that far over half of serious football players suffer brain damage of some sort or severity. Football and boxing are not likely to go away in our generation, but they will have to be modified greatly or they will eventually be considered a sport only us ignorant ancients would engage in.

So if this test where to be administered, it would indicate that close to 100 million people in the US alone have schizophrenia.
Though when I look at my co-works I sometimes wonder... :-)

I’ve found this reasoning specious ever since it was part of a George Carlin skit. The Earth is essentially a large rock that happens to have a thin coat of delicate living goo on it. The rock of course will go on. Now if that thin goo is reduced to just some kind of primitive microbial mat, well then yes the Earth and life has gone on, and evolution will kick in to start the climb again. But the whole “Earth will go on” statement seems to imply Earth and its ecosystem are just too big to fail or that it doesn’t matter that it is no longer habitable by humans, all that matters is somehow, some form of life be here and start evolving again. How about we care about the all the life that is here now, both animal and human?

In the late 70’s and early 80’s I worked as a DJ in a roller rink. Kids would line up their boom-boxes along the wall and record our whole show. Then they’d play it back to their friends in the parking lot. The recorded sound was awful (those built in mics were crap, not that the speakers were much better), but they didn’t care. They had their music – the quality of which must have been augmented by the memories of it when they heard it over our actually pretty good Altec-Lansing sound system. They would have totally shit their pants to have the quality of a YouTube rip.

A shout out to anyone that ever skated at The Skate Ranch in Milan Illinois. I’m the guy that designed and built an Apple ][ controlled scoreboard style sign in the parking light with 8,556 light bulbs (in four colors none the less). I’m talking full text scrolling, animation, and WYSIWYG on the monitor. Circa 1980. I was the shiz before I went to college (self taught programming and TTL logic circuit design). Now I'm struggling to keep up with the new kids.

That Slashdot posts a story about the UI change on a news site. That said, it is awful. I went to the "blog" about the change to comment on how ugly it was, but the "blog" doesn't have a comment section -- just an explanation of why this is such a good change. Slashdot has changed over they years, sometimes I didn't like the new look, but they were usually minor changes that grew on me -- apart from the god-awful moderation changes they tried to force (I set my account to classic, has that rework been withdrawn?). That said, why doesn't CNN offer a range of Skins for frequent visitors. They could even choose the most popular Skin as the default, or allow users a random choice if they like a different look every time. For that matter, Slashdot could offer Skins. Users could design and post them in their accounts like blog skins.

You seem to contradict yourself “Computers are less good at autonomous driving because the rules aren't as clearly defined”, and yet here we are with self driving cars already and soon to be affordable by the masses. Computers are becoming better at dealing with messy data. They are getting better at just about everything across the board and yet you would mark their progress at 0%, because evidently they can only follow rules. Is a neural network just following rules when it teaches itself to play Go? I’m assuming you would say yes. How about this, the neurons in your brain are just following rules when they sum action potentials across your synapses. I would concede that computers are not highly self-aware (yet). Are all animals highly self aware? I remember when people use to lament that computers where not as smart as a mosquito. I think we are probably at least to reptilian levels of self awareness and intelligence by now. AI is progress far faster than evolution did in creating human intelligence and only seems to be accelerating. No one thought 15 years ago that we’d have self driving cars by now, that computers could parse speaker independent speech, and identify objects in pictures even the species and bread of animals in pictures. By denying that there is true AI now, you seem to imply any true breakthrough in self awareness and self motivation are decades away if not impossible. I suspect self awareness will coalesce as AI gains more skills in more domains. I don’t mean coalesce on its own, but knowledge feeds on knowledge and AI workers will eventually crack problems that seem insurmountable now. Seems they get no credit for doing things that just a few years ago where suppose to be decades away.

As they say in the stockmarket:

Past Performance Is Not An Indicator Of Future Results

Educating our general populace to a higher degree will help, but at some point the knowledge curve will be too steep for most people to get educated enough to get a job that really adds to production. There will be jobs gains for sure from new and novel activities, but I'm willing to bet starting in 5-10 years job destruction will far outpace job creation. You really think all the truckers in America are going to become coders or entrepreneurs?

So don't drink more than 24 cans of Diet Coke a day (125mg) or 52 cans of Diet Mountain Dew (57mg).
Good to know

Why the sudden switch from meters to cm when 106cm is 1.06 Meters? Comparing 1.7 to 1.06 is much easier to process, instead of making us go through the double check in our mind that we got the units right.

Yeah this kind of stuff never happens. I remember hearing a whole lot of hooey about some scientists trying to release enormous amounts of energy in a an explosive fashion by splitting the atom. Like that would ever work...

If you bought a chauffeur service you would expect the service to pay the chauffeur, maintain the car, and maintain the insurance. This isn’t much different (other than you own the car). Tesla is large enough to create the shared risk pool that insurance is founded on. Better yet, by also being the insurance it incentives them to make their cars as safe as possible. I don’t image regular insurance companies are too happy about this and will propose various strawman arguments in an attempt to keep Tesla and others from doing this once self-driving cars really get popular. In fact this all in one model is about the only way self-driving cars will be able to work. Self driving cars will only be safe as long as they are always maintained in top condition. Sensors have to be functioning and calibrated. Brakes have to be in good working order to maintain the cars safe expected stopping distance. Software upgrades are needed. Etc...

Once driver error is not the major factor in accidents it just doesn't make sense to keep the old insurance structure as the fault will almost always be with the manufacturer. This does of course reduce the insurance company's incentive (in this case the manufacture) to really go after claims due to negligence, though that will still be a private legal suit option. Let make sure providing the insurance doesn't also take away your right to sue.

Sorry about misspelling Ad as Add so many times. I was a bit aggravated and in a hurry posting my rant. I have AdBlock on several other browsers and machines, but the one I'm on now is a company box and I don't use it for as much random surfing as my home box. That said, I've installed AdBlock now and all is well again, though I'm still a little unhappy about having to do this to continue to use Slashdot in a a sane manner. It reminds me of having to specifically choose classic mode when they changed the Mod system. Note, there was a substantial decline in the quality of posts after that change. When you decide the user experience is less important than the Ad revenue it can only lead to decline. Slashdot use to be great because its text dense comment system was fast and you didn't have to have 10Mb download speed. Please don't become like every other overly ad crowded bullshit site out there. Please let us have one forum that reminds of us of some of the simpler and better times on the internet.

I have been a contributer on Slashdot for over 15 years. There have been things to complain about over the years, but FOR GOD SAKE don't let the banner adds chase everyone away. What's more annoying than a Banner Ad? A banner add that doesn't scroll away as you read.

Serious, I will never visit Slashdot again if this isn't fixed ASAP.

Don't be like the thousands of other crap sites that are doing this now. I don't care if it is in the advertisers JavaScript, find somewhat to stop that shit OR I AM GONE!

Lithium is more common in Earth's crust than lead. Plus unlike coal and oil, you use it over and over again and can be reclaimed after batteries are no longer rechargeable (or obsoleted by newer technology). Any shortages are just because we haven't ramped up mining/recovery of it. Once demand is really there we will probably extract it from sea water where it is in relative abundance (and fare less destructive than your apocalyptic mining hyperbole would be).

Anything with the word China in it seems to be red-meat for the Slashdot crowd. Having actually RTFA there isn’t much in there that is different from how liberal democracies go about trying to encourage economic growth. China is mostly Communist in name, but this isn’t to say their system operates identical to ours. I have been to China seven times in the last ten years, so I can give you a reasonable impression of life there. People going about their day-to-day lives do not liver under constant fear and oppression. Life in the big cities is very modern. The country is virtually two countries in one. The modern cities and the backward villages. That said the government wields a big stick in getting big projects done (sometimes without enough forethought). I find most people fear China is going to far outstrip the west in science and economy in the not too distance future, most of the rest think it is a powder-keg about to self-destruct. Neither view is very close to the truth. As China pulls into parity with the west, it’s economy is slowing down because it no longer is leaping from behind by leveraging cheap labor and because labor is not longer staying cheap (because economic success has created a prosperous middle-class) and because automation is destroying cheap labor’s advantage anyway. China is desperate to raise everyone into the middle-class so as to sustain their economy on internal domestic consumption. So while the party is coming to a close, they still hope to get the job largely done without have two separate classes of citizens (city dwellers, versus farmers and villagers).