This is the age old economics 101 thought problem: there it is usually phrased in terms of kidney dialysis. Do you sink all your kidney money into dialysis for the ones you know you can prolong their lives, or do you siphon it off for research. How much do you allocate? What are future generations worth?

Nothing special here regardless of your disillusioned rants on big pharma.

Being unemployed causes a myriad of problems one doesn't have whilst employed. In the U.S., health care is a big inducement to work for "THE COMPANY".

"You know, doing it in a real world setting and demonstrating it is a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe the lie these companies have done an adequate job at security."

No, it isn't, and that's a false choice. It is analogous to shooting a gun in crowded room, observing no one was hit, and then claiming it is a good way to show the police are not doing an adequate job of security. You'd better hope they don't pull this stunt again and cause the car's driver to lose control and wipe out half of your family so the other half can grieve.

This is the same governor who assigned some of the Texas National Guard to observe the Jade Helm military exercises in the southwest because he had been convinced that it might represent a threat to Texas. The idea was that Obama was using Jade Helm as a trial run for martial law before he declared himself President for Life. I wish I were making this up.

"desktop users who want complex and powerful programs to do things?" There aren't enough users who want or need complex and powerful programs to do things. Almost by definition, this will be a small subset of most organizations.

That at it becomes cheaper for corporate IT to support BYOD than building out infrastructure in-house. It also allows idiot MBAs to have their favorite stuff without requiring much support from IT. And when all the real app work can be done in a local cloud which IT can control, all that is required is a UI. Mobile works for much of the UI.

More to the point, MS have the idea that an ecosystem means windows in some form or another. Apple succeeded because they were able to look at parts of the economy in isolation first. If it had a tie in to something they were currently doing, that was even better, but they do not seem demand it from the outset. MS seems to have given their troops marching orders of "Show us a new way to integrate something into Winders". The result is that no market segment they attempt to enter is ever covered adequately with a device + software that addresses its needs. Rather, that they attempt to turn that segment into another outpost of Winders.

It is called MBA Breath. It is putrid, you want to get away, but the memory lingers with you like a malevolent spirit.

"Rule of thumb: If there's a human endeavor that doesn't make human lives better, then it is not worth doing." Really? The Large Hadron Collider. It won't do a damn thing for humans in the foreseeable future and no one is going to trust your prognostications that it will sometime in the distant future. Better shut it down.

The Pluto Probe? Won't do a damn thing for humans. Is it worth it? Group theory? 100 years ago it wasn't worth a damn thing.

The point is that we should do Science for Science sake. Sometime it in the future it might pay off. We cannot know that now. So we should not decide NOW whether it is worth doing.

You mean machines taking over physical labor has worked in the past. Now, machines are taking over intellectual pursuits. What jobs are supposed to be generated out of that?

The problem is that you have assumed an open system. The rest of the system found other things for people to do. When machines start taking over intellectual pursuits as well as mechanical, you've pretty much covered all human endeavors. The system is now closed. You need to find some way of enlarging the system and you'd better do it fairly quickly and constantly, humans have ways of multiplying and turning on each other when they have idle hands.

You mean in the past technology has increased jobs. There is no universal law that it be so in the future.

My sister tried to use this argument about why a particular tree limb didn't need to be cut down. It had never fallen in the past so it would never fall in the future.

"If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed."

Nope, the American economy at that time was very insular. In fact, the U.S. went into a recession after the war because it had too much excess capacity now producing things that neither the American or any economy needed. It took until 1950 before gdp hit the same level as 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation).

Exports didn't start making up a big part of the U.S. economy until the free trade agreements after 1970. One of the things that caused the inflation during the 70's was the 60's. Johnson thought he could have guns and butter. It turns out you can, for awhile, until the extra cash in the economy caused it to overheat. Reagan, but mostly Paul Volker as head of the Fed, wrung it out of the economy....errr...but not the deficit spending, that increased under Reagan. The dot com bubble during the 90s soaked a lot of that up, and caused the budget to balance. Clinton had little to do it with. The bubble burst about 8 months before his presidency ended and thus ended Al Gore's chances to be president. The U.S. then went into a recession from the burst dot com and then 9/11 happened which depressed economic activity further.

If Iran violates the agreement, what is Europe going to do other than attempt another talking cure? Come back when you folks grow some balls.

Nope. Iran has a ballistic missile program. They don't need enough nukes to wipe the U.S., just threaten New York or Washington.

Israel...total domination over the Sunni countries in the mid-east? How?

Recognizing Kurdistan would cause that little jerk running Turkey to invade the Kurdish regions in Syria and Iraq after declaring Kurdistan to be a threat to his existence. NATO could do much seeing as Turkey is part of NATO without first kicking Turkey out of NATO. They'd be loath to do that. Let's assume they do. The ballless freaks known as Western Europe would decide a talking cure is in order and attempt to talk Erdogan to death. The U.S. doesn't have the assets or the will. Iran would also think of Kurdistan as a threat and take a chunk of it as well. Iraq would see what was happening and decide they too would like a chunk. Meanwhile, Daesh would see this and capitalize taking a bit for themselves.