You said everything I wanted to. Wish I had mod points for you.

That's the federal government for you, trigger happy assholes. You NEVER get elerium out of a shoot-down. They can't do anything right.

I'm one of those very people who will shout you down by yelling MARXIST! IN fact, I have done it elsewhere in comments on this very story! And I am right, it is Marxist... ... but "Marxist" means "Marxist," not "wrong." If you think Marxism has a point or some observations worth value, please do call people like me out. Robotics is "means of production" and "ownership of labor" rolled into one - its exactly what Marxist theory is all about! I believe that history has soundly refuted Marxism to the point where I don't feel obligated to explain why every time I mention it - but that doesn't mean I'm exempt from having to back up my argument if someone DOES challenge me on it! By all means, challenge - many people express opinions they don't truly understand because they're "accepted" truths that are never challenged; those people are just as ignorant as any other.

"Manna" starts out with a very interesting take on how Artificial Intelligence/automation might affect low-skilled labor in a manner very different then "traditional" predictions; but it soon devolves into the same old worn-out Luddite bullshit with a generous side-helping of classic Marxist paranoia. In a post-scarcity society where armies of tireless, self-repairing robots can provide 100% of needed labor, what happens? A paradise on earth where nobody has to work for a living? No, of course not, those EVIL CAPITALISTS lock all the "poor" people in dungeons made of literal dirt because they're evil and like to see people suffer! Unlike the liberated wonderful citizens of Australia, who implement post-scarcity society along with some neat little improvements - such as slicing out a chunk of your spinal cord and replacing it with a computer, allowing the government to monitor your every waking moment, through your own damn eyes, and literally shut you down like a stolen car with On-Star the second you do something they don't want. In the story, that last little breathtaking bit of Orwellian nightmare is expressed in breathless tones of approval, by the way. Skip Manna. It's crap, and it adds very, very little to intelligent discourse on this subject. But then again, so do most comments in threads like these. For a site supposedly populated by tech nerds, every story on Robotics draws Luddite comments like moths to a flame.

When Snowden first started leaking intel, it almost all pertained to the blatantly illegal and overreaching domestic surveillance of US citizens. Now that Snowden is in Russia, being offered jobs by Russian firms, his leaks are ones that greatly embarrass the US on the international level and spoil relations between the US and its NATO allies. This isn't a coincidence. The Russians snapped up Snowden the instant he landed in their territory, and now he's entirely dependent on them - even for a livelyhood, now. I wonder just who has custody of that laptop with all the encrypted files he was toting around, at this very moment. Even if Snowden still has physical possession of it, I rather suspect the Russians are the ones making "suggestions" about how he uses the data therein. He started this as a whistleblower - and he might well still be one, but I doubt he's calling the shots anymore.

With the new springy suspension landing legs in the latest version, it actually works, too.

I stored all my pokemon on some random guy's PC for years and never had a problem...

It is alarming how eager people are to turn over so much control to computers

Anybody claiming that this system cannot put a rocket motor into orbit is wrong. The military has been usung rocket-assisted artillery shells for a long while now, as well as GPS guided shells. Right there, you have enough tech to put a solid rocket motor into orbit with enough control and telemetry to establish stable LEO.

People keep on comparing Glass to bluetooth headsets without actually reflecting on why we hate them. It bears repeating: we hate them because of those several awkward seconds where you try to reply, thinking you're being addressed. The "asshole" part comes when the headset user says something like "hold on, this guy thinks I'm talking to him" or something else that implies you're an idiot for not immediately recognizing the headset. It's embarrassing, and insulting, and dismissive. In short, it takes basic social conventions and protocol and rudely slugs it in the face. Said social conventions, even the customary "good morning" a fuel station clerk greets you with, is lubricant for the social gears of society, and those headset users are sand in the works. It's not the headsets at all - its the people using them that never apologize for the misconceptions they cause, or politely put their conversation on hold when they walk up to a pay window.

Everyone screams and wails about being "recorded in public," which I find hilarious, considering how much we're already recorded, tracked and observed. If you're in public, people can record you freely, and no court of law is going to give a rats ass that somebody was able to SEE you when you went walking around on a public sidewalk. No, the real discomfort comes from having a computer screen between you and the person you're talking to. Google Glass is the first step towards things like augmented reality and other such technologies; but the precedent we've all learned from is the Arrogant Headset Asshole; and so naturally that's the first association we make.

Thoroughly debunked. http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/mind-the-gap-between-rhetoric-and-reality/#axzz2PjxGYDxd

Lets play Occam's Razor! Which scenario is more likely: A, you're full of shit, or B, there really IS a "complicit hand of the economic elite" that destroyed that perfect postwar-to-80s world because it was a "threat that could not be allowed"? If you'd added some mad ranting about Jews and moonbase-lasers your argument would be no more convincing, but at least it'd be slightly less stale.

Allow me to provide some data from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center's Survival Scores Research Study: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fletc.gov%2Freference%2Fresearch-papers%2Fsurvival_scores_research.pdf%2Fdownload&ei=up5EUdO3FbDLyAHi2YCQAw&usg=AFQjCNF1ZxlAG0Av6U-paxnsJ2g56jRlKg&bvm=bv.43828540,d.aWc&cad=rja See page 32 for the relevant information: in simulated shootouts, most of the participants only achieved a hit rate of 20% at a range of 3 yards. The bulk of the study focuses on WHY this happens; the various psychological and physiological stress responses that make accuracy relying on fine-motor skills so difficult.

Does very little to protect officers from knife violence, lead pipe violence, gang of crooks swinging fists violence, and so forth. Why is "gun" violence the only kind of violence anybody cares about?

Private arms aren't for fighting wars, they're for making police states untenable. Furthermore, there's additional context for this concept in the United States specifically. Dictatorships maintain power through control of entire populations - this requires armed police officers or other kinds of enforcers on every street corner. There will always be far more subjects then police to control them, which is why a force multiplier is so important - i.e., firearms. If the subjects have their own weapons, the power disparity falls below the threshold needed to ensure effective control. Even if the police have selective-fire military rifles and the subjects have .38 revolvers, this is enough - a simple revolver makes it vastly easier to waltz up to an armed enforcer on a street-corner and plug him before he recognizes the threat; and then YOU have his fancy rifle. Single-shot, stamped-metal pistols called "Liberators" were manufactured en-masse and airdropped to Resistance fighters in WWII on this same principle. As for context, the United States was founded by people with a specific mistrust of government power, and our armed forces were organized with this in mind - the "civilian-controlled military." There is a complex network of legal blockades and cultural resistance to the use of military force against citizens in the US; and they're a large reason of why National Guard armories are spread out over the country, often a good distance from Federal military bases. In any doomsday scenario it is highly unlikely the entire military will stage a coup as a single united entity.