I didn't say humanity was going away. I said that a substantial amount of the population was going to be stuck living in abject poverty for 50/60 years until our economy somehow catches up and finds new jobs for them. This is what happened when the Industrial revolution hit. A whole lot of completely unnecessary Human suffering...

And the thing wrong in your post which others have not already pointed out is that many phones come with the ability to add a wireless coil of choice already, even older phones like the 3 generations old Galaxy S3 which has a pair of contacts right above the battery. That isn't even taking into account phones like the HTC One which has had wireless charging since its early models.

and, assuming that we can get roughly equal capacity at more economic temperatures, what kind of range of capacity are we talking about here? Would you be able to power a toaster or a city?

Even in the sex-free-est society, revenge porn is not seen as being good. The guy is an asshole (and anybody having posted photo there without consent) and may his reputation follow him around. This has nothing to do with sex being shameful or not, and everything to do with consent and revenge.

The interesting part about waiting to flip the switch is the "why" part. Why would you flip the switch? To install new firmware of course. Why flash firmware on the HDD? Because you have a problem with the current one.

This results in a few scenarios:

1. The malware is hyper advanced and automatically updates to infect the latest firmware.
2. The malware fails as soon as the user updates the latest firmware.
3. The malware completely overwrites the new firmware with the result that the user may attempt to re-flash or even send the drive back because the problem isn't fixed by the firmware that isn't currently installed because of the malware.

For this attack to work we're looking at malware of rather insane sophistication in which case I highly doubt I'm the target.

Yes we could concoct an elaborate scheme involving some deep firmware hacks on people's harddrive which is highly hardware dependent.

Or you could just send the people a phishing email.

I know which I would be doing if I were going after the millions of dumb users out there.

Increase manufacturing of course.

The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things. Yes it's not perfect but the reality is people have been saying x technology will destroy the workforce since manufacturing at scale began, and the reality has been that as people have been replaced, manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more.

it pretty much _did_ happen. There was a 60 year period during the industrial revolution when millions were put out of work and tossed to the wayside. There's a reason why Luddites existed. They weren't forward think people. They were Luddites for Pete's sake. They were living in the misery caused by a lack of jobs in their day.

The industrial revolution caused massive unemployment, and it took the economy 60 years to catch up and start creating new jobs. If you lived after that period things got better as new tech created new jobs. If you lived during that period and weren't born wealthy life was Nasty, Brutish and Short. I'd like to skip that cycle this time.

Oh and there's one other thing: we're better at automation this time. So there's a good time the cycle will last a _lot_ longer. e.g. instead of 60 years of poverty we might be looking at 100, 200 or more while we wait for Star Trek style replicators and massive population declines to fix things.

Cheers, thanks for replying.

I must say the change this time is being handled very well compared to beta.

In case you need any further information here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing

Screen resolution is 1440x2160 and because of the small HDPI screen I browse with a 150% zoom on Chrome.
Of note is the topics bar already runs off the screen on the right but the main content is squished into just the standard browser width.

Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years. In the meantime we'll have 2 or 3 lost generations who live in terrifying abject poverty. It'd be nice if this time around we did something about that...

While I think the new layout is much better than beta, it has broken my normal Slashdot reading experience.
I was reading using Google Chrome on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.... vertically. I tend to browse a lot of news vertically. This limits the vertical screen resolution.

The old slashdot layout imposed a minimum screen width and would provide a horizontal scrollbar which allowed me to see the stories without a sidebar visible.
The new slashdot layout locks into the screen resolution such that the stories on my screen appear to be about 3cm wide fitting about 4 words per line, and the right sidebar is a cool 12cm wide full of useless stuff (for reading purposes anyway).

Can slashdot please impose a minimum width on the container that contains the main content?

Problem is 100% reproducible on all browsers. Simply change the width of the window to around 650px. i.e. open up two browser windows side by side and the front page goes to heck.

Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assuming that someone knows something etc. There's nothing magical about a face-to-face meeting that can't be communicated via a telephone using a different method. You said it yourself, it takes longer, but as soon as you include travel it is actually far more efficient.

Spend $5k on sending each person to a business communications class, and an how to run an effective meeting class. Then save yourself $50k / year on flights.

This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.

That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.

no one has made the large touch screen that you plugin to the LAN and it just does that ...

Sure they have -

http://smarttech.com/Home+Page...