Because in a world where 99% of the people are literally unemployable (because anything they can do, a robot can do better and cheaper), the alternatives are grim -- either mass starvation, or civil war.

Yes, I'm familiar with the standard conservative moralizing. But that approach only works in a world where those actions are possible, and in the scenario we are discussing, they won't be.

I never said it wasn't open source. My comment was about whether or not it's "locked to a single platform". I assert that without a herculean porting effort, it effectively is.

C'mon. Bridging API frameworks is where "it's at" today.

I'll believe it when I see it. I guess getting it to run under WINE might be doable, but then again that was equally doable (at least in principle) when the source was closed.

I'm not sure how sound that logic is. You might as well say that cars can't be any faster than their creators.

My computer is already smarter than me in certain ways; for example it can calculate a square root much faster than I can, it can beat me at chess, and it can translate English into Arabic better than I can. Of course we no longer think of those things as necessarily indicating intelligence, but that merely indicates that we did not in the past have a clear definition of what constitutes 'intelligence', and that we probably still don't. Meanwhile, every year our game of "No True Scotsman" whittles away our definition of "true intelligence" a bit more, until one day there's nothing left.

While your prediction is entirely valid, I'd like to point out that it won't be the robots causing the civil unrest, but rather society's (hopefully temporary) failure to adapt to a new economic model where workers are no longer required for most tasks.

Having menial labor done "for free" is actually a huge advantage for humanity -- the challenge will be coming up with a legal framework so that the fruits of all that free labor get distributed widely, and not just to the few people who own the robot workforce.

Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".

It's entirely irrelevant when we're talking about 44.1kHz audio, which is what we are. The cable would have to be ghastly to the point of basically not working at all to bugger up 44.1KHz audio, even uncompressed (which is only 1.5Mbit/sec)

The question is: is the signal-to-noise ratio good enough? If so a cheap cable that passes the data is every bit as good as an expensive one, so long as the packets arrive intact at the other end.

Ethernet already does a lot to counter noise. The signals are differential pairs (so instead of having ground and signal, you have signal+ and signal-). The wire pairs are twisted, which keeps them in close proximity. Interference tends to be common mode noise (so for two wires close together it will affect the signal in each wire almost the same), and differential amplifiers are designed to only amplify the difference between the two wires and will therefore reject common mode noise. Each end also has an isolating transformer, and each end has proper termination (to avoid things like reflections which can bugger up signal integrity). It takes a significantly terrible out-of-spec twisted pair cable to make ethernet stop working.

Incidentally, the signalling for 100baseTX ethernet only has a fundamental frequency of 31.25MHz (naively people would expect 1MHz per 1Mbps but this is not so). 100baseTX uses a 3 level (in other words +1, 0, -1) non return to zero signalling (in other words, a 1 will cause the signal to change level and a 0 will cause the signal to remain at the current level - or it might be the other way around, it's a long time since I did this stuff). Each 4 bits is encoded into a 5 bit symbol designed to prevent long runs of 0s (which would cause the signal level to remain constant for too long). Lots of people call an ethernet connection a "broadband" connection, but it's not, it's baseband (hence the "base" in 100baseTX).

Its like saying "Hey, Chevrolet, you know your customers like the radio station set to 101.9, why cant you engineer your cars to respect their choice instead of forcing your nefarious 101.5 agenda."

Yeah, but this is a Mozilla car analogy we're talking about here.

In the current 2015.7 model, release, the UX team has decided that a 5-button hamburger menu on an AM dial (and only from 1100Khz to 1150KHz in 10KHz increments) is all that's needed. Users who want to access a wider range of frequencies in the AM band are free to write an extension or purchase a third-party radio head unit.

To further improve the user experience, we remind prospective extension developers that in the Aurora channel for the 2016.1 model year, the about:config setting for frequency.megavskilohertz has been removed, along with the FM antenna. The UX team has made this recommendation based on telemetry that suggests that few drivers actually listen to FM radio, especially since the 2013.6 model, in which the AM/FM toggle switch was removed because the UX team for 2012.1 felt it was cluttering the dashboard.

...and the thinkpad keyboards. And the thinkpad clitmice, with the hard buttons (goodness, that last almost makes me want to use one of the more polite forms of the name...) I looked at this briefly the last time I went shopping, but lack of input options made it seem awfully unattractive for some of my 3d modelling work.

(So I have two Thinkpads, a w-series for when I'm doing serious simulations and don't mind the weight, and a yoga12 for running around with.)

Same thing he usually does, I suppose... he'll just keep using whatever is currently installed on his PC, until one day he decides to buy a new PC, at which point he'll start using whatever OS was pre-installed on that one.

A few years ago the U.S. military were evaluating a new hybrid vehicle to replace the Hummer. Their main interest was logistics, since Hummers aren't the most economical vehicles to operate. They couldn't help but notice that in electric mode their new vehicle was quiet.

Around here the Toyotas are positively noisy. The Teslas, on the other hand, only make a faint whirr from their tires.

...laura

Right, because there won't be any upscale car-sharing companies that specialize in date-worthy automobiles. That could never happen, the free market wouldn't allow it!

Yes. Switching computers on my KVM switch (scroll lock + console number)

I'd have to question that (not that she has to do it or the reasons she was told, but the supposed reality that elders can't read normal text as well as caps). One of the pieces of research that was done here in the 1950s resulted in motorway road signs in the UK being in mixed case rather than all caps - it caused howls of anguish from old-timers resistant to change - but the thing is words with lower case text have more of a shape - for instance "Manchester" can be resolved as the word "Manchester" much faster than "MANCHESTER" - it was found you could read the mixed case before you could even resolve all the letters because you could recognise the shape of the word, given that lower case text has more features like ascenders and descenders. Hence all UK road signs ever since have been in mixed case.

I was thinking more along the lines of sending up an anti-drone drone to grab it and drag it back down. After that you can rely on the legal precedent of "finders, keepers" to add it to your drone collection.