Ah, but one of those "certain areas of the world" is cities in America. It is easy to recruit a bomber in Kandahar or Gaza, but that doesn't help you blow up the White House. But a robot builder could dispatch a self driving car to drop off a swarm of fence scaling robots that could blast their way in. And he would live to launch another attack when the next swarm was assembled.

The beneficiaries are the people that paid attention in school, and did their homework. Income has stagnated for the bottom quintile (the people competing with servo motors). Everyone else has done better over the last 30 years.

MOOCs exist to train cheap workers and (in the long run) to soak up gov't subsidies cheaply. Real learning is hard. It's a full time job. The assumption with a MOOC is the person is working a full time job already. Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time. That's why we used to give students money while they went to school...

This is zero sum thinking. That is not how real economies work. Here is a thought experiment: You run a factory making widgets, that employs 100 workers. Someone invents a tool that has negligible cost and doubles the output of each worker. What do you do?
Option A: Fire half your workers since they are no longer needed.
Option B: Realize that each worker is now generating twice as much revenue and far more profit, so you hire more workers and expand your factory.
Throughout history, in each new wave of automation, we have picked option B, growing the economy, expanding employment, and raising living standards. I see no reason to believe that robotics are fundamentally different than the invention of the plow, or assembly line.

If you are an American (or even if you are not) I recommend reading this: The Constitution of the United States of America.

The Bible doesn't influence our society because of what it says, but because of what people that haven't read it think it says. Reading the bible can also be detrimental to your religious faith. But a big benefit is that with a thorough knowledge of the bible, you can really annoy any missionaries that knock on your door. I think I have managed to get on some sort of black list, because I have noticed several groups of clean cut bible carrying young men visit my neighbors but skip my house.

Great idea! What could possibly go wrong? The worst that could happen is that 100 million people are murdered or starve to death, and a billion more are impoverished. Maybe the Russians, Chinese and Cambodians will volunteer to be the guinea pigs.

This seems backwards to me. Robots open up many new opportunities for asymmetric warfare. Attacks with suicide bombers are limited by the number of volunteers willing to die. Cheap robots do not have the same limitation. Once Al Qaeda masters robotics, we will be in big trouble.

Too late. The neolithic agricultural revolution has already eliminated 99% of the jobs. Very, very few people are now employed as hunter-gatherers.

Except that these "implications" have been studied to death, and even discussed numerous times on Slashdot. The vast majority of economists consider automation and productivity to be good things. Wealth and prosperity come from the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". There is some question about the distribution of the increasing wealth, but the same concerns were raised when cars, computers, and even telephones were first introduced, with many predicting that they would be available only to "the rich" and cause mass unemployment. There is no reason to expect robotics to be different from previous episodes of automation.

In an ethical society, citizens should have a right to petition their government for a redress of grievances. If the administration had properly responded, instead of stonewalling, then this stay would not have been necessary.

The apple doesn't fall from the tree -- the internet's daddy was DARPAnet, brought to you by DARPA, who is part of Dept. of Defense -- good 'ole DoD.

In other words, the internet is a military brat. It wasn't militarized, it was born into a military family.

Unless you have a diplomatic passport, then yes, your briefcase can be searched at the border for any reason or for no reason.

Well, it certainly wasn't Albert Einstein. The quote first appeared in print in 1983 (in a book by Rita Mae Brown), when Albert Einstein had already been dead for 28 years.

Reminds me of that Fix TV show where a woman married a millionaire sight unseen. When they got home she found and ordinary house with a discarded toilet in the back yard, she found an ordinary looking woman under the heavy studio make-up.