You can turn in your man card at the desk on the way out.

Wah. Allowing some stranger dictate to you what you must do or be, based on his own arbitrary conception of masculinity, is a pretty spineless way to live.

Actually, making tools and organizing labor is we're really good at. I personally have never killed anything larger than a bug in my life; I suspect a lot of other people haven't either. I've never had to, because there have always been other people who are willing to do those unpleasant tasks for me, in exchange for modest amounts of money.

Granted, I could learn those skills (and others) if I had to, but it would probably take me some days or weeks before I got good at it. It's not clear I would survive long enough to learn them.

So yes, humanity is the most deadly predator the planet has ever had. Any particular human being, OTOH, most likely is not -- we're more likely to be the most effective C++ programmer the planet has ever had, or the best Fedex deliveryman, or some other not-so-helpful-during-the-zombie-apocalypse skill.

How long would it take the 95% to eliminate (or convert, if you prefer) most of the 5%?

Sorry, could you rephrase your questions? I didn't understand what you were asking, as I was unable to see your facial expression as you were typing them.

Wow, you are one twisted individual :)

That's the thing, isn't it? It seems OS look-and-feel trends are just going around in circles.

Perhaps they should just make a slider that lets you choose which year you want your desktop to look like, and be done with it. (or would adding that feature remove peoples' sole remaining incentive to upgrade every other year?)

Good idea! We can hire drone pilots for cheap in, say, Pakistan. I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan. ;^)

That sound you just heard was all the Canadian readers falling over from laughter ;^)

Thinking of my nephew. He used to eat a lot of peanuts, then - as a teenager - he ramped that up and pretty much overdosed.
He is in his mid 20's now and allergic to them. Too much of a good thing and all that.

It's not that ideologies are always harmful, so much as that acting without thinking can be harmful, and ideology discourages people from thinking things through for themselves.

If people are carefully and honestly thinking through the consequences of their actions, they are less likely to harm themselves or others.

If, OTOH, people are blindly following dogma rather than engaging in rational thought.... well, often that isn't an immediate problem (either because the dogma is reasonably applicable to the situation at hand, or because the consequences of the decisions being made on auto-pilot are not too severe). But it does open the door for serious harm to occur, because people who aren't thinking are not able to quickly or easily detect or amend their mistakes.

I'd go with another theory -- there are very, very few people inside the USA who want to be terrorists (and even fewer with the required combination of skills and ruthlessness to actually pull off a successful act of terrorism).

The reason why: If you're living in a hopelessly dysfunctional third-world hellhole, you don't have a lot to lose, so you may well just say "screw it" and throw in your lot with the local terrorist militia, in the hopes that shaking things up enough might somehow improve things. If you're inside the USA, on the other hand, your quality of life is (or at least, can be) much higher, so you'll be less tempted to throw all that away for the glory of jihad.

Getting into the mall will become such a hassle that almost nobody will go there; instead people will do most of their shopping on line and the rest at non-mall locations.

Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.

A major part of programming is talking to your users, learning about what the problem is that they need to have solved, and then designing a program that will (hopefully) solve that problem for them in a reasonably acceptable manner. If/when a computer program is intelligent enough to do that, then we've pretty much reached human-level AI, and at that point the world will be so different from today's that underemployment of human programmers will likely be the least of our concerns.

He's not kidding. I looked at my cat through VR glasses and saw this.

The fix is to make the "short" end of the tube taller, so that it sticks up above the Earth's surface as much as necessary. Oh yeah, and put a handrail next to the airlock.