Automation is making unions MORE relevant than ever.

Wrong, you haven't been reading closely enough. Boxing is actually safer than playing lineman, which is a total surprise. They are finding the worst injury in players that don't normally have a lot of concussions, but instead who play positions where they are constantly running into someone else at slower speeds, like lineman. When you play line, you have about 2 feet between you and the other guy, so you aren't building enough momentum to knock them out or to even realize that it's causing injury, but you are hitting them every play. It's a huge number of very small blows that is causing the most damage. No one knew this. Again, this is happening in players that have never been knocked out or shown any signs of trauma. It's a complete (literal) game changer because it means that ANY amount of repeated trauma, no matter how slight, has a cumulative effect that won't show up until much later.

You provide no evidence that you can find a cure far faster than you would ordinarily. In fact, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that a bunch of distracted cancer researchers might get LESS work done when you force them to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with the public at large. Also, there is a huge bottleneck with respect to access to medical equipment, so what you are likely to end up with is a ton of uneducated guesses (the opposite of an educated guess/hypothesis), requiring a lot of time to sift through, and still have the issue of not having enough resources to test them. This is far from being the magic bullet that you confidently suggest it is.

The only thing I find surprising is that someone in power actually cares enough to measure this sort of thing. They've known about this for decades.

I've always found the best way to find great news sources is to hold them accountable and stop using them when they screw up the big stories. For example, when the media was shocked by the 2008 crash, I wasn't. I had predicted it 5 years earlier (not necessarily when, but the fact that it would happen). How? I took a look at the small handful of pundits and bloggers that accurately predicted the demise of the tech bubble and looked at what they said would be the next bubble. If people actually started paying attention to the sources that get it right, vs the ones with the largest reach, places like FOX wouldn't exist. What I have found over the past decade is that far left independent news sources get it right far more often than mainstream (or far right) new sources.

The election is another great example. Some people weren't surprised, and those are the ones that we should look to next time, unless we enjoy being a bunch of dumbfounded idiots all the time.

Have the people cheering about ARM considered a career in sales and marketing? The arguments in favor of ARM dominating Intel on the desktop seem about as shallow and vacuous as the CISC vs RISC "debate" that occurred during the 90's, exactly what I'd expect from enthusiasts who have no understanding of how computers work. Yes, ARM does some great things in it's space, but claiming they will wipe Intel off the map is the kind of hyperbole I expect from uninformed stock market analysts, or for that matter a tech magazine looking to generate a few extra page hits (including slashdot), not serious engineering types.

In that situation the government is participating in the fraud, by granting the patent in the first place, which means it's ok. :) I say this tongue in cheek, and also, this problem might end with the patent office/court, but begins with wealthy "inventors" who have sought to bribe legislators into creating the system of "intellectual"*
"property"** that we have today.

* last time I checked rounded corners don't require much intellect
** using property as a metaphor for ideas is intellectually dishonest

From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.

You are confusing the end product (build) with the source code. Linux is still linux whether or not it is running on a refrigerator, router, or a workstation. The same goes for versions of Windows that are built for different hardware. Yes, they are different builds, but run on the same source kernel.

I find it pretty sad that even Allen is finding problems with it. I can't say I understand the necessity of making a workstation OS easy-to-use on a phone. They should have been focusing on making it work better on, you know, workstations. For example, I have 3960x1600 pixels of resolution on my current workstation, and windows is a complete dog in terms of window management. How exactly does Windows 8 address this? It doesn't, but gee, it works great on a cellphone/tablet, which maybe I'd care about if I actually ran Visual Studio on a fucking cell phone. As it stands, this UI is an inconsistent piece of garbage, whose sole purpose seems to be to force me to waste my time learning how to use their mobile UI, in the hopes that maybe I'll be more likely to buy one of their tablets.

Basically you are saying that anyone that doesn't watch tabloid news is an idiot? Because really, that's what you are implying, which is kind of funny when you think about it. There are a lot of people that don't keep up with Hollywood/tabloid news that are perfectly reasonable, sane, intelligent individuals.

What's really funny is when people are elitist about it.
"Anyone that doesn't know about X is an idiot!"
"Really? How would they have known it?"
"By staying glued to their TV set,that's how."
"I see."

You should study the history of anti-drug research. One of the original studies that claimed marijuana caused severe brain damaged basically put face masks on monkeys and had them inhaling nothing but smoke for a significant period of time. The cause of the brain damage was CO poisoning and general hypoxia, which should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain. No one breathes nothing but smoke when they smoke. That's what a lot of studies do, they give a subject 100x the dose that is used, or use some unusual delivery method, and perform the study on it, drawing absurd conclusions that aren't event remotely scientific.

The purpose? Funding, plain and simple. Studies that are anti-drug get lots of funding, and those that aren't, don't get approved (by the DEA when performed on humans) or funded. Why? Because the government funds the studies and the drug war is a political tool that they need evidence to support. A huge amount of science is shaped and steered through funding, and it absolutely biases the results.

If you are reasonably intelligent, this shouldn't surprise you. We've had quacks for the entire history of science and medicine, and many of them have used science to explain what is clearly a politically motivated status quo. Just look at all the studies that assumed minorities were inferior, and proposed to find out why (by measuring brain volume and other anatomical characteristics), without first checking the assumption that minorities were inferior.

I've had experience with pair programming. In my mind here are the pro's:
1. It keeps you engaged and prevents your mind from wandering.
2. It is a great way to teach junior level programmers, many of whom suffer from a lack of training and are thrown to the wolves in the beginning of their careers. I would have LOVED pair programming (in small doses) when I was starting out. It's a great way to learn things about a complex system that are not obvious.
3. Different people tend to approach problems differently, and this difference in perspective can make it easier to catch bugs that are not obvious to a single programmer.

The Cons:
1. When abused, it can reduce productivity by distracting coders and not allowing them the space they need to think.
2. It can create a hostile environment where the employee feels that they have no privacy, room to think, and where they are constantly being watched. This is part of why I think management loves it so much, they are outsourcing micro-management to their underlings.
3. It can reduce motivation of individual developers since the buck no longer stops with them, but instead is the group's (or pair's) responsibility. While diffusing some responsibility across the team is not a horrible idea, people tend not to be as motivated. I observed motivation take a big nose dive when the shop moved to XP, since people were no longer as accountable for finishing anything, they just had to come up with a BS explanation for what they did the past day during the scrum, and really, it's a lot easier to BS one day at a time than it is to explain just what the hell you've been doing the past two months.
4. Many poorly designed XP programming environments are inherently disrespectful, and are merely an attempt to turn a programming shop into a factory floor with no privacy. As a skilled programmer, I won't go along with this, and I actually refused to move into this kind of space at my last job, and instead left, along with the majority of seasoned developers.

Overall, I can get some of the benefits of pair programming by walking down the hall, grabbing another team member and saying, "Hey, could you take a look at this?", when I'm having trouble finding a bug. It shouldn't require them to sit there all day.

What's really sad, is that we have overworked people, and unemployed people. We have homeless people, and entire subdivisions sitting empty. Some of the people that are homeless actually worked on those houses. That's what happens when you have a society the doesn't care about justice, but instead about mindlessly following rules. I ask people,"Why not take the empty homes, and let people that actually worked on those homes live in them until we find a better use for them?" Most people react in horror, because there is a principle that they are defending. The principle is that it doesn't matter if people starve and die, nor does it matter all that much if someone acquired property through less than scrupulous means. The sanctity of their ill-acquired gains cannot be questioned, even if it means the guy who actually built the house is homeless. They mindlessly believe it produces the best outcome, but reality begs to differ.

People worry that if you take the decision of who gets property out of the hands of the market, even a little bit, that we'll descend into a totalitarian communist dungeon. But, there are more ways to slice the pie than competition and cooperation (or capitalism and communism). Our mistake as humans has been the idea that an unchanging set of rules will get the best set of results. I'm inclined to believe that any unchanging system that doesn't make a just outcome it's primary goal is subject to being gamed into oblivion. The rules, no matter what they are, should always be bent to get a just outcome.

Capitalism is a man made system just like any other. It is created by humans, and it is gamed by humans (quite easily). Ultimately people need to realize that it is up to all of us to figure out what we feel is a just outcome, and make sure that it happens, rather than leaving the outcome up to following a set of rules.

When I work 16 hours a day I'm not able to find time to get any housework done, and in general a lot of work on my personal todo list doesn't get done. There is such a thing as PERSONAL productivity, not just productivity for your employer. Of course, no one cares about the needs of workers. The needs of workers are invisible and completely left out of the definition of "productivity".