Imagine the Chinese, Indian etc workers as robots[1]. Have all the US workers who've lost their jobs to these "robots" experienced the increased number of jobs you mention? Now imagine what happens when Foxconn et all replace those Chinese workers with real robots (as Foxconn is actually doing).

What will these Chinese workers do? Some of them will take your higher end jobs: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
From the article:

If the population growth remains at X% and the Earth resource/wealth extraction rate does not increase by much more than X% if robots and automation take some human jobs, there will NOT be replacement jobs that pay out the same amount of wealth. Because in most cases automation is about reducing costs and increasing profits. Furthermore the resource extraction rate cannot continue increasing as long as we are stuck on Earth[2].

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
tldr; the automobile destroyed the jobs of the horses, there was no increase in replacement jobs that the horses could do.

And that is what will happen to most humans once the robots get good enough.

[1] Many of these workers are actually doing jobs that are "robotic" and could be automated- it's just that they are cheaper and more flexible than current robots and someone else paid for much of the manufacturing).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Why does a distributed social network need servers at all? Why not just flag stuff on your PC to share? It gets copied encrypted into a bittorrent directory using a session key, and that session key is held in a wrapper than can only be unencrypted by the people/group you have 'shared' with. The bittorrent network will ensure it's available even when your computer is off. Adding nodes to boost network speed just means pointing some bittorrent client to that .torrent.

Phillip.

It also makes sense to raise the issue with downstreams such as Debian, OpenSuse, or Fedora (assuming they exist for the project). Or if it is in one of the enterprise GNU/Linux distributions, approach those vendors.

I would say the winners of 2013 would have been Mint and Ubuntu Unity. The former kept up its head of steam from the previous year, and the latter became so polished it was winning over a lots of haters.

In 2014 Unity got shotgunned by insisting on sticking spyware in the desktop by default and veering towards mobile. Definitely the big losers of 2014. KDE came up with their latest distro based on the new QT but lack of polish on the desktop meant they didn't get much traction.

Gnome desktop has probably made the most progress, but screwed themselves by being the best on minority distro Slackware and the most popular distro Ubuntu running an old buggy version.

So I would say the winner would be Mint due to being the only one not to fuck up.

Phillip.

I wear Old Flux. That new low-lead stuff just doesn't smell right.

Old Flux. The solder your solder could smell like.

The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.

Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.

What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.

In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?

If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.

The majority of the gamers who wrote Intel agree with you. In fact, the entire furore over the past month seems to have cemented the idea of "gamer" as a inclusive, universal identity into the collective mind of the gaming community across the web.

However, that was not the argument the Gamasutra and other articles made. The gaming press collectively declared that "Gamers were dead", that gaming as a descriptor was obsolete, that the "identity was dead", or referred only to a obsolete subset of exclusionary, female unfriendly, "selfish", "conservative", "tribalistic", and -- implied by the accompanying stock images -- fat angry unkempt adult males.

Meanwhile, games companies, marketing firms and online game fansites were still actively using the term to refer to everyone who, well, plays games. Even Forbes magazine was shaking its head in disbelief at the game media's attack on its own consumers. People are now asking how much damage recent controversies may have done to the public image of the gaming industry.

A $80 billion dollar industry which had achieved almost universal consumer acceptance and success may have just been torpedoed as a woman-hating "Cathedral of Misogyny" by its own press publications. Intel is cutting its losses before the conflagration spreads to the rest of tech.

For anyone interested, here is a link to the article Intel pulls ads from Gamasutra over. It is ... colourful in its descriptions of gaming to say the least.

'Game culture' as we know it is kind of embarrassing -- it's not even culture. It's buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it's getting mad on the internet. ...

It's young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don't know how to dress or behave. ...

Traditional "gaming" is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug. ...

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no 'side' to be on, there is no 'debate' to be had.

About ten or so articles like this appeared over the course of a few days at the end of August across most of the top game news sites. Apparently, a lot of gamers were upset enough to write into site advertisers to request they stop sponsoring the offending site with ads. Intel have evidently made a dash for the door out of a building the owners have decided to set on fire.

The author of the piece, Leigh Alexander is a described feminist critique of video games and video game culture, as well as wider "geek" cultures. Her personal views on geeks and their fandoms are ... equally colourful.

Why do you sometimes mock 'nerds' and 'gamers' so virulently? Isn't that the same kind of bullying you rail against? ...

Self-identified nerds are often so obsessed with their identity as cultural outcasts that they are willfully blind to their privilege, and for the sake of relatively-absurd fandoms â" space marines, dragons, zombies, endless war simulations â" take their myopic and insular attitudes to "art" and "culture" with tunnel-visioned, inflexible, embarrassing seriousness that often leads to homogeneity, racism, sexism and bullying.

Nerds escaped high school. Some of them made millions making video games. Digital literacy doesn't make you special anymore, it makes you baseline employable. Fantasy is on mainstream cable. ...

The fact you got a Game Boy for Christmas and liked it so much you stopped doing anything else doesn't entitle you to a revolution. Your fandom is not your identity. Your fandom is not a race.

I am not convinced that this person is not an ultra-conservative plant sent to discredit feminist and progressivism in geek and gaming culture. If she is, she's making a spectacular effort at doing so. This entire furore is doing real damage to the genuine participation of women in the video game and even wider tech. Intel's pulling of ads might help take the oxygen out of this fire before the industry gets burned.

I have to agree with BarberaHudson. Of course market share is a major factor in how much advertising is worth. Companies also look at growth. When Firefox was expanding with no end in sight then signing an expensive deal would have been worth it for Google: if Firefox became de facto then they had an exclusive deal and captured all the eyeballs, and if their immature project took off and became de facto then... they still had all the eyeballs. Once growth starts tailing off the value of marketing drops.

However the funding had in part to do with the marketing aspect, and secondly to buy their way into creating a level playing field. They were perfectly aware of the Microsoft embrace and extend, and they way they tried to lock business users into IE using ActiveX plugins. A completely open source browser dedicated to open standards getting a majority share of the market would ensure that the market remained wide open and ripe for picking once they had advanced their own browser far enough to complete.

The deal probably will be renegotiated but will it be a lot of pain? Possibly not. If the investment was wisely used, refactoring, quashing most of the memory leaks, boosting the JS engine, etc, then if they "broke the back" of getting a great stable core then perhaps a renegotiated deal will be fine for both parties. Google certainly can't afford for Firefox to go away yet. With Google facing ant-trust cases in various countries, helping "promote choice" is not a bad PR move either. As well as providing yet another alternative to Safari on Apple.

Phillip.
PS - AC fuck off. You are wrong and BarberaHudson is right

I have a task bar on my desktop. It's a simple shell extension. I minimise stuff all the time. Nautilus not having a minimise button is one of the only things that drives me nuts.

Phillip.

Why not just click the suspend button under the power icon on the top bar (if you hold down Alt it displays suspend instead of shutdown)? Works for my workstation.

Phillip.

I think users tend to slop around from desktop to desktop. I know I have used most of them out there. I really really wish Ubuntu would move to 3.12, let alone 3.14. It's very annoying. Suspend is easy though, simply hold down alt, click power icon then suspend. Works fine on my 2 monitor tower.

With KDE still having usability issues and Unity having spyware, this would have been a great opportunity for Gnome to get market share. Instead you have a choice of installing Slackware and losing that amazing Ubuntu repository, or having the wide range in software but being stuck on buggy 3.10. What a waste.

Phillip.

Samsung galaxy S2 April 2011, S3 May 2012, S4 April 2013, S5 April 2014.

Apple iPhone 3S July 2008, iPhone 4 October 2011, iPhone 5 September 2012, 6S September 2014.

The Apple market are completely locked into one device, and are forced to wait twice as long on average to be able to upgrade. Therefore I would expect the numbers to be twice as large initially but dying off to a far smaller total than the Samsung devices.

Phillip.

If it's a video, you can see if he is going it correctly. With two factory resetted phones, pressing the on buttons at the same time and seeing which one boots first is not rocket science to do. Lab not needed. Same with launching a browser.

Phillip.

Upon loading the site just now, I found I've been moved back to the classic slashdot system. I'd like to thank the admin responsible. It's nice to be able to read posts again.