If automation doesn't kill at least 50% by 2025 I'll have my robot eat its hat.

What hasn't happened yet is the creation of the IBM PC of robots. There have been a few cracks at it such as the PR2 but I see that as more of a Sinclair than PC. I want a whitebox robot that I can then glue bits on through a PCI type interface equivalent and make it a factory robot, a hospital robot, or an agricultural robot. For instance I was looking at a machine that was making pretzels and someone had called it a robot. I would have called it a slightly adaptable pretzel making machine.

I have two rules of thumb for what I call a robot: One is that it adapts to its environment somewhat; for instance a garbage picking up machine that looked for garbage, picked up garbage, and did other things such as bringing back a full load and dumping it would meet rule one. Rule two(the lesser rule) is that at the core of the machine can be adapted to something else. So the garbage picking up robot could have some bits switched and it could be a mowing robot or a snow removal robot. I am not saying that the actual garbage robot would be swapable, but that the factory that makes them would be at least adapting a central common core.

So a roomba very much meets rule one but is mostly failing on rule two.

And my rules also apply to software that eliminates a job. I suspect that the software that replaces a call center worker will end up being related to the software that replaces a medical doctor on diagnoses. So adapts to is limited environment, and has a common core.

But when robot designers are working with tools that meet both of my rules then the robot revolution will take off and the job losses will be astronomical. Basically any fairly repetitive job that follows a simple set of logical rules is doomed. This describes many many jobs ranging from building cleaners to medical doctors. Oddly enough some lower skilled jobs will require humans for a very long time. Car repair would be a good example. Often when a car breaks in some way things can be disrupted. So that a simple repetitive routine won't work. Things need to be pounded, pried, and even torched to even get things apart. But computers will assist with such a job by helping to diagnose. If robots are going to damage the car repair profession at all it will be by the robotic assembly of cars resulting in more reliable cars and fewer accidents by robotically driven cars.

The local (a 2nd or even 3rd rate) medical school has pushed for a BSc in Medical Science which is starting its first year the past September. The dean of the medical school told me that the HS class average was 98%. Quite simply many public schools won't grade inflate enough for a 98 average. My daughter had the highest grade 12 math average in a 1000+ HS at 97. (She didn't apply to this program) But that might not have been enough.

There are all kinds of ways that a superior student could end up with far less than a 98%. Taking advanced courses, taking lots of hard courses, entering plenty of math/science competitions, fantastic science fair projects, etc.

Basically what they are saying is that you get to go to medical school if you have OCD and aren't interested in anything else.

Some med schools also have lists of this or that activity that they like to see but then the students go through it like a checklist.

I have long thought that there should be more of a risky system where you apply for medical school and then spend 6 months doing medically related things but then the people who just don't fit in are dropped. The same with other programs such as physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.

If this turns out to be provably true then an easy solution would be to boot Russia from the swift system for a few weeks. That would basically mean that no international transactions could take place large or small. Or if they wanted to make it interesting they could restrict swift transactions to minor amounts so that the very richest would be impacted while the average Russian would feel a lesser impact.

But large food importers and whatnot would be massively impacted.

But before this can be done Europe needs to find an alternative to Russian Gas. But when Europe does then they won't tolerate Russian shenanigans for 1 second.

The key is that any retaliation needs to hit those around Putin who can change their mind about his being in power. The average Russian on the street will choose Putin over the West nearly 100% of the time.

If they were charging some people $1,000 during that time period then it would only have taken 600 customers to cover the fine. With all the smaller fish who were fried it could easily have been millions. Plus the huge inconvenience for those who went without. This fine should have been ruinous and someone should have gone to jail. Someone really senior, not just some tech dweeb who was scapegoated.

One of the rules that have long thought should be that when a corporation commits a felony there should be mandatory jail time and that it should be at the highest level that may (not certainly) have been aware of the crime. So if a UPS driver runs someone over going too fast that he may or may not go to jail but that if they can show that some executive was told that some policy would push drivers to speed, then boom it would be whatever sentence that would apply had he been speeding himself.

The average speed of a train in Canada has slowed significantly down from where they were in the 1930's. My family recently took a few trips to a location that is 2.5 hours of driving and the scheduled time for the train is a bit over 3 hours. Each time it is usually around the 4 hour mark and sometimes has exceeded 6. Plus major rail lines are being ripped up and turned into walking trails and the runs are far less frequent on the remaining ones. The areas with the removed train services have sunk into economic stagnation.

You might be thinking that we have a marvellous road system or something but, nope, our potholes have potholes (pictures available) and our most productive fishing and farming areas have a tortuous routes to get to major markets.

This is fairly typical of most of Canada with the exception of a tiny corridor running by the Ottawa area (our federal capital).

Unless it is a really violent religion that actively encourages human sacrifice as one of its lesser requirements for entry into heaven. Or it is one of these massive time wasting religions where people forego nearly every productive activity to do religious stuff; basically worse than TV is now.

Religion is something that an ET might bring. It could be in the form of creation myths, some strange gap they discovered in physics and a religion built up around it. Or they may have always had a religion that drove them to pursue physics with a fanatic's zeal resulting in space travel while not straying from their core faith.

Or even worse, they could be way ahead of us in pretty much every science yet have a fanatical religion where the two options are pretty much to pray to some god or spread out and convert other species.

Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.

But if they do come with any religion at all we can all be certain that it will end up with adherents on Earth. Seeing that we have Neo Nazis there is no creed too stupid for some people.

I would no more call this a robot than I would call an xray machine a robotic innards examiner or a smoke detector a robot fireman's nose.

I would call it a robot if it wandered the streets of Bangkok smelling for the most Thai food and recording on a map where it found it.

Does this benefit the population at large or does this benefit corrupt officials and the large corporations that corrupted them?

And then there is unreliable which can allow for awesome statistics, for instance they could tell the FCC that Netflix is 105% faster than Hulu but that the way it works is that Netflix has a 5% packet loss that are perfectly selected to cause the most trouble with the data stream.

Also if these paid agreements are so "reasonable" why not buy exclusivity? That is that when these companies negotiate their fast lane contracts to make it exclusive fast lane access; that is to basically pay to block the competitors out. So Hulu could buy the all the fast lane access for video subscription streaming locking out Netflix. Or google could buy up all search engine access.

Plus this would then give comcast incentive to make an ever greater divide between the two speeds and keep slowing down the slow lane. I suspect that the ever shrinking legroom in economy is increasing first/business class ticket sales.

Basically allowing any form of non-network neutrality will only make a few scumbags richer and the rest of us greatly poorer in both money and quality of services.

A fair percentage of people who travel on airplanes are assholes; plain and simple. So to give another tool for these douchbags to continue their assholery is just stupid.

A great move for the airlines would be to de-shithead their passenger lists by banning the use of mobile on the plane. I would happily travel on any airline that had a no cellphone rule for the simple reason that any remaining airlines that let people use their phones would magnetically attract the wankers away from the awesome airlines.

I suspect that there will be magically connection rates but this will just be a dickwad amplifier in that the people who use the phones will be government and large organization types on an expense account and will be ultra fartbreaths while they are talking since the calls will cost so much.

But on a more serious note allowing cellphone use on airlines will be stupendously dangerous seeing that some vigilantes will take jammers with them. While cellphones have been pretty solidly proven not to interfere with the avionics I am fairly certain that a jammer would have a substantially negative effect.

To give an example of just how much of a crap-for-brains type of person I am expecting I will give a recent restaurant experience. There was a guy in a very small restaurant who kept getting calls on his phone that he was not answering on his very very loud phone that didn't have voice mail. So basically the phone was ringing for about 50 percent of the time that I was in the restaurant. The fattened pig of a human being just sat there ignoring the phone and the horrible effect that it was having on anyone else. The owners of the restaurant were there and did nothing (as I would expect most airlines to do). What would this guy do on an airplane at 2am? Let the phone ring for 4 hours straight, or silence it? BTW the guy was not deaf.

I do have a happy ending, when my lunch friend and I went to both drop our 1 star Yelp reviews we saw two others relating to the same incident. The four 1 star reviews made up over a third of the total reviews; smashing the 4 star rating to 2 stars. Cellholes can really piss people off.

Lightning can easily give off Xrays and even Gamma rays. So would it also be possible that these people who have this blast right along their skin are also getting a solid dose of radiation.

There are huge swaths of things that I don't understand about most technologies that I use. I could not even begin to enumerate the various obscure ways that "const" can be used in C++. But I have deployed many product using C++. The same with SQL databases which I have huge amounts of data happily going into and out of. These things work as well as I could hope and my understanding of them is well sufficient for me to be happy. I suspect that if I hired a top of the line C++ or SQL expert that both my code and my databases could be vastly improved from a working well to working even better.

But with both of the above examples, not only did the products get deployed but as new functionality was required no real barriers were hit during development. But with MongoDB basic data in/data out functionality was developed and deployed. But as new functionality was required the fight with MongoDB became a huge waste of time.

And my credibility comes from the fact that the same functionality was easily deployed in other tools learned before and subsequent to MongoDB. My point being that it was time wasted on a technology that absolutely did not live up to the hype. I didn't say that my MongoDB couldn't do it(who knows) but that the potholed road to getting there was not worth driving when a smooth traffic free 8 lane highway existed going in the same direction.

So my recommendation is to use MongoDB if you want to look cool in 2012 and like to flagellate yourself.

I tried MongoDB and I even tried to like it. I do love NoSQL but what I came to realize was that MongoDB was trying to tell me how to solve my problems instead of just storing my damned data.

But the real problem with MongoDB was that nearly everything, while appearing simple, required a google search to figure out how to do it. A mark of a very well designed API is that you soon start guessing the commands and your guesses are really close or right on. But with MongoDB I found that nothing really made sense. Only after carefully crafted "debate team" arguments could any unusual aspect of MongoDB defend itself. Whereas redis is the opposite, it just works. Or even simpler systems like Memcache, that couldn't be simpler, when read the API for either of those they just made sense. There is no layer upon layer upon layer of complexity. It is data goes in, and data comes out.

In fact redis would be a good example of ease of use mixed with advanced capabilities. The basic commands are things like get, append, save, while more advanced commands are more esoteric such as PEXPIREAT which has to do with timestamp expiries. So you can happily use redis like a simple minded fool and it is wonderful. Or you can dig in deeper and only mildly shake your head at some of the command names. But with MongoDB it is just a pain in the ass from the first moment you truly have even vaguely complicated data.

But back to PostgresSQL. The JSON related features are mildly complex but appear to be solving the most common problems. Also by using PostgresSQL it solves the entire debate of relational vs NoSQL. Use PostgresSQL and you can just do both without giving it a second thought. And I for one can certainly say that I have data that demands NoSQL and I have other data that demands relational; all in the same project. But oddly enough the technique that I use is MariaDB for the relational and redis for everything else. This is ideal for me as the relational data is very simple and won't need to scale much whereas the redis stuff needs to run at rocket speeds and will be the first to scale to many machines.

But as for MongoDB, it has been deleted from all machines, development and deployment and will never be revisited regardless of this weeks propaganda.