Same thing that people did when looms took over the textile industry. When the electronic computers took over for human computers. When switching circuits took over from telephone operators. Move on to the next job that machines cannot do.

In the late 1800's 70-80% of the US workforce worked in agriculture. Today that number is 2-3%. If mechanization was going to leave people without jobs it would have already happened.

Of course the naysayers will cry that not everyone can be an x, y, or z. But why should we expect to know any better what the future holds than people of the past. If you had told some farmers in 1863 that in 150 years almost no one would work in farming and that millions of people would be employed as web developers they would think you were insane.

Mankind's desires have no limits, it is only our resources that constrain us. There will always be something. Even if that something is handcrafted hood ornaments.

More likely Win7 and Win8 are much harder to pirate, so a huge portion of the chinese economy is faced with either going without updates or actually paying for windows. Either way it's going to have a negative impact on the Chinese economy. Pay Microsoft (the Americans) or pay the hackers.

I'm with you on that. There is no way to have a phone converstation without being a distraction to everyone else in the room.

As a 20 something I'm eagerly waiting for these baby boomers to just retire so we don't have to deal with thier nonsense. There is nothing wrong with answering a text message in a meeting if your are not involved in the conversation and you don't disturb anyone else.

Here is my list of stuff that is rude that over 40s do that I wish would stop:

• Calling me on the phone and reading out a string of technical information. Put it in writing, put it in an email.
• Print all of your emails. Sometimes other people would like to use the printer.
• Complain that "new" technologies like version control are too complicated and therfore not worth learning (I'm not kidding).
• Expect me to provide you, a programmer with decades of experience, with technical support.
• Not knowing how to silence your phone.
• Telling me how much fast/better you can do something than me. Nobody likes a braggart.
• Grumbling about stuff people my age do, to my face.
• If you have bifocals you don't need to take your glasses off and lose them.
• Use Power Point.

A market captured by a monopoly is not a free market. That is why Standard Oil (88% of the market), etc. Had to be broken up. It has nothing to do with "jealous little creatures".

And when something even worse comes along legalize Krokodil.

That is a bunch of crap. It has nothing to do with population density, and everything to do with how messed up the market is. I know because the situation here in Canada is the same as in the US. A handful of companies control the whole market.

Here is an example for you. Finland has crazy good internet connections, with only a population of 5.4 million. Where I live in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has a population of 6 million. My city has more people than some whole European countries!

The New York Metropolitan Area has 23 million. Thats half the population of Spain!

This idea that population density is the problem is bullshit.

You do realize that there are hundreds of variables involved here right? Every FS in that benchmarks has lots of tweaks that could make things faster/slower. Plus the differences in kernel version, differences in benchmarks versions, hardware differences, etc. You can't be all things to all of the FS. For example turning on compression for btrfs produces huge performance improvements, but that isn't used either.

The test lists all of the gritty details I can think of. They may not be optimal, but it better than handwaving the settings or nothing at all.

If your interested the phoronix_test_suite is FOSS can really easy to run, so if you have some hardware and time, run some benchmarks with a use case you feel is appropriate and let us know how it goes.

Phoronix Benchmarks will give you an idea of the perfomance differences. Btrfs is usually middle of the pack, so nothing to write home about. The big deal with btrfs is the new features like COW, snapshots, filesystem compression, etc. If you are looking for more performance btrfs is not going to impress. If you are looking for better RAID perfomance, snapshots, compression, etc. Then btrfs is going to be huge for linux. It is probably the closest linux will get to having a ZFS clone.

White phosphorous is not illegal, and it is not a chemical weapon.

White phosphorous (WP) is a chemical that burns very hot, very bright, and produces a lot of smoke. This gives WP a number of military uses including incendiary, illumination, and creating smoke screens.

There is nothing illegal about using WP for illumination or smoke screens. In fact it is quite common. In fact it is not even illegal to use it as an incendiary. What is illegal is to use any incendiary on a civilian centre.

It is illegal to use incendiary (fire causing) weapons in urban areas, so no napalm, WP, petroleum jelly, or equivalents. This is because incendiary weapons start fires which kill indiscriminately and can easily create fires too large for firefighting efforts to control. The firebombing of Tokyo (100,000 dead) and Hamburg (42,000 dead) are examples of using incendiary weapons in an urban area on a large scale.

The problem is that the media dumbs everything down to WP == incendiary == war crime. Which is like claiming laser guided bombs = lasers = blinding = war crime. Next time you see someone in the media talking about WP war crimes take a look at the evidence. If the WP didn't start a fire it wasn't being used an an incendiary.

Chalk River was a completely different scenario.

First the reactor had two sets of redundant cooling, but one of the sets was not earthquake resistant. Secondly the government didn't fire any plant managers, they fired the head of the nuclear safety commission, Linda Keen.

The nuclear power plant didn't produce nuclear power, it produces a huge portion of the worlds medical isotopes: Cobalt-60 (75% of global supply), Technetium-99m (80%), etc . Many of isotopes have a very short half-life so it is impossible to stockpile them. The risk of planet failure was real and it could have killed people. But shutting down the plant would mean running out of these medical isotopes which would result in many deaths.

Taking the balance of low risk (due to only one of a several safety features being disabled) versus unavoidable deaths the parliament on the advice of industry (both nuclear and medical) experts passed a law allowing a one-time short-term (120 day) exception to normal nuclear safety practices and ordered the reactor restarted.

The nuclear safety CEO Linda Keen, *ignored* the order issued by parliament (ie. she broke the law) so they fired her as CEO (but she is still a member of the commission).

Absolutely true. However the key word is possible. Looting and plundering are still quite profitable but the majority of wealth now comes from increasing productivity. Many billionaires like Gates, Jobs, and Buffet become very wealthy working within the capitalist system.

Another way to look at it is to look at the global average income over last few hundred years. It has been increased significantly despite a growing population, showing the total amount of wealth in the world has increased. When you look at individual countries, growth was and is fastest in capitalist systems. The most obvious cases being China, Eastern Europe, and East Asia.

The whole system by which the No-Fly list operates is stupid. If the government wants to have a no fly list, then they should have to justify to a court putting someone on that list, before the name goes on it.

If you want to search someone's house you need a warrant. If you want to tap someone's phone you need a warrant. So why don't you need a warrant to stop them from flying? It just seems stupid to me. Also when does your name of this No-Fly list expire? Wire taps expire, warrants expire, so how come you can be put on a No-Fly list indefinitely?

Sounds like a good project for a Raspberry Pi.

Get a Raspberry Pi and install Fedora or Debian on it so you can have standard OSS software and drivers for USB Webcams, microphones, a USB hard drive, and you might as well through in a cheap GPS unit for good measure. Using standard linux tools/scripts have the system mount the HDD as an encrypted disk with LUKS/encfs /etc. and have the USB+Microphone+GPS stream to the disk using log rotate to ensure there is enough space on the disk every time the system boots up.

Once you have the whole thing working install it into the vehicle so that the Cams/Mic/HDD is in the dash as part of the car. Wire up the Ethernet port to the dash so you can connect to the RaspberryPi via Samba/NFS to get the files if you need them. Then wire-up the system to a little on/off switch.

This way you should be able to record what ever you want securely, and have lots of storage space in case you need to leave it on for a long while or record multiple things. If the cops find out that you are recording them they cannot just take the disk from you since it is built into the car. In order to get at it they would need to impound the car, have someone open the dash, take the drive, and then erase it. All this would be a big hassle and create a paper trail which they would have to justify in court. Since the videos are encrypted they would have to get the password from you, again creating a paper trail to prove that there is video evidence. You can't stop them from destroying the disk once they get their hands on it. But destroying the disk after having someone at the shop remove it would look awfully suspicious, especially since the boot up log on the SD card would show that it mounted correctly.

This article is absolute garbage. Almost everything in that Guardian article is misinformed and sensationalist.

"fully autonomous war machines"? Care to give an example? I've follow this stuff pretty closely in the news on top of researching AI myself. And from what I have seen no one is working on this. Hell, we've only just started to crack autonomous vehicles. They site X-37 space plane for gods' sake. Everything about that is classified so how do they know it is autonomous?

My favourite gem has to be this one: "No one on your side might get killed, but what effect will you be having on the other side, not just in lives but in attitudes and anger?". Pretty sure that keeping your side alive while attacking your opponent has been the point of every weapon that has ever been developed.