Personally, I find markup on a laptop or tablet pure agony and a distraction from what I want and need to post. The informal forum for me.

The days when the geek could wall himself off from the world are long gone, every decision he makes exists within a larger social context.

That is why stories like Gamersgate touch a raw nerve and can't be wished away.

The distinction between live action and animation has been blurred for decades.

Tron is the primal example. Rocket Raccoon is a fully realized character in Guardians of the Galaxy and not the comic relief or the blink-and-you'll miss it Easter Egg cameo of Howard The Duck.

Curiously unemployment remains consistent with historical norms and there is no indication automation is having a meaningful impact on employment rates overall. How do you propose to reconcile your assertion that automation is increasing unemployment when all the data indicates that it is if anything having a positive or neutral effect of employment?

Really? Automation is responsible for dropping the percent of people working in agriculture from over half to somewhere around 2% in the US. Do you think your life was not improved by that? Automation has made tasks like washing your clothes, cooking your food and getting clean drinking water basically afterthoughts. Do you think your life wasn't improved by that? Automation has eliminated countless tedious and wasteful and repetitive tasks for clerical, agricultural, and manufacturing workers. Do you think their lives were not improved by that?

The US is among the most highly automated countries in the world and also has among the highest per capita GDP. Those facts are not coincidences. The same is true of the EU and Japan. This meme that automation is going to take away all our jobs and turn us into unemployed paupers is ludicrous and tiresome and false. People have been making the same dystopian claims about automation for ages and it's just nonsense.

Even forgetting the security issue, going around with a pump and injection line connected all the time is a lot more of a pain in the ass than current methods. Also, it can't make judgements based on future activity - you might want less insulin than normal because you're about to embark an on 3-hour bike ride, which if you take your regular dose, will make you hypoglycemic, pass out, and wake up in an ambulance or the hospital (insulin efficiency increases with activity level, which is why you need less insulin when you're about to be active for any period of time).

You can't even get to the nearest star in one lifetime - how are you going to export the excess population to other planets? Humans are not semi-rational when it comes to devising schemes for division of wealth - just look at the US. Look how many people are STILL defending the over-breeding ignorant hypocritical Duggars, or anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive people.

And mating is not driven by status - otherwise rape wouldn't exist. And how many people engage in a one-night drunken hookup and the next morning go "Oh my $DIETY, I didn't really f*ck that, did I?"

Mating is driven by testosterone - just look at how many guys get caught literally f*cking the dog, or even screwing a porcupine.

And how do you expect the increasing number of people who won't have money from employment to pay for their health insurance? Countries that have public health care still finance it through taxation. Reducing working wages by working fewer hours doesn't pay the bills - ask all those people working just under the legal number of hours to be considered full-time.

They shouldn't have charged him with making death threats, but rather with criminal harassment or intimidation. Then it's the mental state of the recipient, not the person making the threats, that applies.

That is a VERY different statement than saying radiologists will be going bye-bye.

You could say that about pretty much everyone's job. That doesn't mean it is economic to do it. I'm an accountant and an engineer myself. Most individual tasks I do could be done adequately by someone else with less education given a modest amount of training. But I don't have endless money to hire other people or purchase automation to do those tasks. Furthermore I actually create some of the automation to make me more effective myself but it doesn't reduce the amount of work. Even if I automate 80% of what I do I will still have 80% of the other tasks that I need to do that would be doable by someone else. The work expands to fit the time allowed. I have effectively an endless to-do list. I just only actually get to the stuff I can actually do in the time allowed.

Not until a LOT of problems get solved that currently we are in no danger of solving. For something like Watson to be useful you have to be able to feed it accurate and useful data in an efficient manner. Medical records are currently in an almost comical state of disarray and are riddled with missing and bad information. Furthermore few medical records systems can talk to each other and there is no indication that will change in the near future. Furthermore what specialists do isn't simply being a differential diagnosis engine. If that were all they did we would have automated it with expert systems years ago. My wife is a pathologist and I can assure that Watson isn't going to replace her before she retires. Supplement maybe but certainly not replace most of what she does.

I'm curious how you think that "modern ethics and integrity" is any different than it ever was. People have been greedy for money as long as there has been money. This is nothing new and I don't expect it to ever change. There never was a good-old-days in regards to ethics and integrity.

You think basic research doesn't benefit society? The value of something to society isn't necessarily reflected in the salary to do it. Nobody (sane) would argue that a professional baseball player is more valuable to society than a school teacher or police officer but we pay them far more.

What does that have to do with research? These people weren't hired because they are great teachers. They were hired because they were great researchers.

Not in your lifetime they couldn't. If you think otherwise you don't actually understand what they do. Doctors aren't just differential diagnosis engines. And even if they were a differential diagnosis (which is all a diagnostic computer can give you) will just give you a set of choices and probabilities. It won't give you a definitive answer because frequently there isn't one. The human body is far more complicated than any program we have access to and you need someone who can think through problems and more importantly deal with people. Computers can help but medicine isn't just about technology.

Nurses do the routine work. You don't pay a doctor to do or diagnose the routine stuff though they certainly can do that. You pay them because they will catch the unusual stuff that a nurse would miss. Doctors are specialists of a sort. If you want to take your trade analogy you could hire a general handyman to work on your plumbing but if it is anything difficult or complicated you probably want someone looking at it who is better educated on the problem at hand. You don't pay a surgeon big $ to do a routine procedure. You pay a surgeon big $ to be there in case something unusual happens. When you code on the operating table the value of their time skyrockets. My wife is a pathologist specializing in skin. Dermatologists are allowed to read their own biopsies but most send the excisions to her or someone like her for a diagnosis because she will catch things they will almost certainly miss. Melanoma for example can mimic a variety of common benign problems which a nurse or even a general practitioner doctor might easily miss. Nurses can do a lot of the things doctors can do but when they run into something subtle or unusual then THAT is when you need a doctor.

Ha! Radiologists are in no way, shape or form becoming obsolete. Technology is making them more effective but they aren't in any danger of disappearing.

I'm afraid not. There is a lot more to radiology than simply trained pattern matching. They've had software to do exactly what you describe for quite some time now and there is no danger that radiologists will disappear anytime soon.

Do you seriously think that medicine is nothing more than a process of matching wall paper? There are some problems that a pattern matching system can help with and in fact radiologists actually have been using such software for a long time now. I did some engineering work in a radiology clinic that was using software to help with diagnostics over a decade ago and the software was good enough to sometimes catch things the radiologists missed. Guess what? Radiologists are still with us and will be for the foreseeable future.

No. What happens is that under the right circumstances the average ends up being correct more often than for an individual. It's called Wisdom of Crowds among other things. It works well with certain types of decision making and predictions, particularly those regarding human psychology. Stock prices are based in a collective opinion of what the price of a stock should be so it's not surprising that a crowd would be better at guessing an average opinion of a crowd than an individual. But this doesn't work for everything.

Automation will supplement what they do but it will be more like accounting software boosting the productivity and accuracy of accountants. The problem isn't actually the medical treatment that desperately needs automation (though it can and does aid in places), it is the paperwork and support functions like billing. The paperwork burden in medical practice is immense and much of it is pointless paper shuffling by poorly paid clerical staff.

It could very well be that Microsoft has decided to give something away without expecting anything in return.

Given their track record, it seems somewhat unlikely.