I guess evolution also falls under "utterly ridiculous and transparent scams", right?

WTF, Flamebait? Who the hell is moderating today?

Any story posted by timothy is not worth reading. I clicked on this one by mistake.

Machines in every form benefit the owners of the means of production, not the worker that works for someone else. This has been a fact since cottage industry gave way to centralized production at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Machines allow less humans to do more work. That is true of the use of the water-powered forging hammer that replaces a half-dozen men swinging sledge hammers, or of the automated alignment and welding assembly that puts car bodies together without using humans for the bulk of the job.

I'm really surprised that fast food and other low-skill, low-wage work hasn't been replaced by robots already. Companies that sell these products have already figured out exactly how hot the grille and deep-fry oil needs to be, how long the meat needs to be in each and when to flip or remove, and given the crap job that the no-skill worker does of stacking the condiments, a machine probably could apply a slice of lettuce, two slices of tomato, meat, and cheese between two slices of bread to make a hamburger before wrapping it in paper.

Fast food isn't a skill. It doesn't even come close to coffee shop barista, where the customer is already paying a luxury price for a human's touch when making a product that could come out of a machine just about as well. If it costs $200,000 per year to pay employees to work a fast food restaurant, and that cost can be reduced to $60,000 per year by the introduction of a half a million dollars of machinery that will last for a decade, these companies would be nuts to not replace workers with robots.

No thank you!

Obama has cut the budget deficit in half since 2008. (Bush left it at $1.5 trillion per year, and now it's about $750 billion). Since $750 billion is still greater than zero, the national debt continues to rise, at about half the rate that it did during the Bush administration- when, if you recall, no one seemed to be complaining about it at all.

Meh. At my workplace we use monitors/etc when we ship stuff where handling matters. If handling goes out of spec, then we'll have some words with the courier, and have procurement bring up that nice exclusive agreement we made that sends millions per year in business their way.

Nah, I'll leave that to you.

That was my whole point. If you want the law to be right, go ahead and fix it. Everybody else is just going to ignore it. They don't care if the law is right or not, because it doesn't really matter if nobody enforces it.

It is just too painful to fix the law. Too many entrenched interests are going to block you when you try. People realize they don't actually have to play that game, and so they don't. We end up with a society where EVERYBODY breaks the law daily as a result.

I don't think it is a good thing, but until it is easier to fix, nobody is going to bother.

Sure, but if somebody did operate an airliner in this manner, I imagine many other components would be failing, creating numerous hazardous conditions.

Maintenance schedules on big things like airliners aren't just created arbitrarily. If the manual says to inspect the turbine blades every n hours then somebody probably did a study that shows that at x% of n hours you start to get measurable deterioration. If they could make the intervals longer they would - it would be a major selling point for the plane.

Sure, this software bug should be fixed, but in general if you're going to allow companies to ignore the manufacturer's guidelines, then you can't really hold the manufacturer responsible for failure.

The pose is a face, a little bit of bare shoulder, hair, and a hat. That kind of exposure (ie, the shoulder) is common throughout the United States anywhere that's warm enough to dress that way. There are entire fashions dedicated to off-shoulder blouses and dresses for women. Women of all ages, including minors, are free to dress that way, and men and women of all ages, including minors, need to learn how to control themselves when something as sexual as a shoulder is displayed.

You want to not be tantalized or enticed? Move to a country that requires women to cover themselves. Otherwise learn to control your base instincts, you animal. If she's not displaying her sexual characteristics then your being excited is definitely your problem, not anyone else's.

Can you cite any evidence of "backpedaling"? The global warming 'pause' is more politics than science

What "pause"?

It most certainly is a fork

Just re branded with node.js replaced with a fork and Chromium as a viewer. Never thought I would see MS use Chrome.

But applause as MS is truly adopting to open source

Ha! That was the backstory of the watchable but still marginal "The Colony" -- an attempt to geoengineer climate goes haywire, inducing a planet wide ice age.