I do love my children, I don't regret that we had them and would do it again.
However, I fail to see how someone could regard children as the goal of their life.

If the meaning of your life depends on your children, then the meaning of their lives must depend on the meaning of their children, etc. etc.
So in the end the meaning comes from the last generation of humans that will ever exist?

I think one must (try to) find meaning in ones own life.

Better than the Java VM? In what ways, and where are references?

In most large corporations, JEE is 50-80% of new mission critical software nowadays. I work for one of the top-5 banks and we use windows only for desktops, and on the server side mostly for small- to midscale software pacakges. All the companies mission critical systems, either bought or built, are either on the Mainframe (diminshing, but that will take 10 years or more to finish) or various forms of Java (JEE, tomcat, hadoop, various other clusters and compute grids).

I see no evidence at all that C# of .net is gaining traction for mission critical server side software.

So you say, if we could automate away all work, because many would not spend all that free time as you think is useful, we have to create artificial work to keep the people busy?

You shoudl imagine the following: you invest $50k to replace yourself (on the job) with a robot. Now you have 100% free time and the robot earns your income, produces stuff etc. Everyone could be happy.

But the question is: who gets to buy and use the robot and its income?

In the end, automation should be able to produce more than enough for everyone. The only remaining question is how we distribute all that wealth.

But I have the feelig that this is not what's going to happen, due to greed and hunger for power of todays "happy few".

n/t

Suppose I could invest $50k and get a kind of robotic copy of myself. I could send that to work and do my job for me, enjoy lots of free time and the same income.

On the other hand, suppose my employer would invest these $50k....

In the end, the question is how the "spoils" of automation will be distributed about the population. Indeed that doesn't look good now.

In the future we will have more than enough production capacity to fulfull our needs and wishes, but if we use that capacity to any good, that is compete redistribution of all of it, is questionable. The current trend doesn't look good, but I think economists will see, sooner or later, that the alternative is for the rich to live in a state of siege, military protected and guarded against the masses.

Economic laws do change fundamentally, it is hard to predict. However, suppose a robot could do the 10-fold work of what most people could do. Indeed we would not run out of ideas on what to do, but if you could replace yourself, would you continue to add your 10% "output" for 10% extra income, or would you rather have 100% spare time for about 90% income? That is the trade off that will be made in the end.

As robots get more powerful compared to man, and the "pseudo-intelligece" will surpass that of most humans for most tasks, I find it really hard to see how most people would still have meaningful jobs.

It is not about imagining the output, it is about imagining what extra significant contributation most men could make in relation to robots.

Sometimes there are benefits and risks at the same time. The suppliers seek big profits and will always emphasise the benefits. It is not that black and white, and therefore not so easy to get a fraud judgement when suppliers skew the opinion of the people through large marketing budgets. The profits easily pay for a lot of influence.

Sometimes politics has to regulate, and especially neutralize the unwanted pressure from commerce. There are various means, such as diminishing the lobby influence over politicians, to having a strong public television system to counteract skewed information from commercial parties.

Working at a large bank, we have 75% java and 25% .net for new server software. Old software is on the mainframe.
Recently it was decided to drop .net and go 100% to java.

We'll keep .net run-time capabiltiy for the occasional 3rd party software that requires it, but I think, java has won in the enterprise. At least in banks, all large payments infrastructure software and the likes are JEE packages.

We used to have .net for more front-end stuff. But HTML5 has made that superfluous. Fat clients are still losing ground, and web-based apps using HTML5 with rich GUI's can be served from a JEE container very well.

Just spread the ip addresses, like in the old days.
In 1988, I used to know lots of IP addresses by heart. Though that will be a bit more difficult with IPv6.
But we have /etc/hosts for that. Almost like a bookmark...

One of the effects of drinking, is that it lessens self control.

Indeed and many other civilized countries show that it can be different. In the UK the police don't even carry guns. Their job is much less dangerous than the para-military job the police is in the US, obviously.

Violence and agression provokes reaction. The first job of the police should be to calm down and de-escalate, not behave almost like an army.
But most US citizens probably don't remember (and never look abroad for guidance) that it could be different.

If any cop that can be proven to have abused his power is fired, it will stop.
If the root of the problem here is actually not the policy, but the individual cops not sticking to the policy, firing is the only thing you can do.
If the root of the problem is in local politics indeed, then these people are lying and those have to be fired (and locked up).

I read that we have lot of old retro-virus material in our DNA. Maybe this is how it went before, we get into a kind of symbiosis with the virus until it somehow merges into our DNA permanently? I'm not a microbiologist though, just guessing.

In fact, the (my) first google hit for symbiosis retrovirus was http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm..., which superficially seems to think in the same direction w.r.t. past.

At my first employer we had exactly this situation. The secretary used to change the backup tapes on the server. We, as a team of 10 developers had been working around 6 months developing software modules when we got a crash. It turned out the backups had been made on cleaning tapes.

This was in 1992, noone had the opportunity to make multiple copies, we only had our disk and the backup. 60 man months of work gone.