That their real implication seems to be that if you aren't interested in getting married as soon as you have a stable job and fathering children, you are a reject. As though the primary purpose for men should be to provide money and genetic material for children. Nothing else matters. If a woman wishes to be a career woman and not do kids until later, or at all, that's great. If a man wants to do that he's defective.

I mean I'll take myself as an example: 31, unmarried, no kids. I own a house, have a salaried job above the median income, with a pension, and in general I'm pleased with my life. I'm certainly no "burden on society" or anything. However, since I spend my time playing video games instead of watching TV (average male watches 4.1 hours a day averaged over a week, average female 4.8 hours, I watch about 0.3 hours per day) and I am not a father, people like this journalist see me as a problem. I'm not busy propagating the species so clearly I'm a loser.

No, sorry, I don't see it that way. In fact the way I see it, we have too many people. Population growth needs to level off if we are to have a sustainable future. I don't want to see that through draconian population control measures, I'd rather see it through people self regulating. Well, I dislike kids, have ever since I was a kid, I always got along with adults better. So I don't wish to have any. However others wish to have more than two kids for a family. Works out.

I will acknowledge a problem if they can show that males are dropping out of society as a whole, as in not getting jobs, living at home, doing nothing with their lives, more with video games and/or porn as opposed to more traditional problems around that (like drugs) but that's it. If they can't show me that, and I suspect they can't, then I fail to see the problem. Video games being used in place of TV as entertainment isn't a problem, and not wanting to have a family isn't a problem (I'd argue it is a good thing for some people to feel that way).

If I'm going to be labeled as "defective" or "dysfunctional" for wanting a good life, but without kids, then fine, I'll own that label because I'm happy with who I am. If it means I never get married, I'm ok with that too. I'd love to find a woman who wants to be with someone like me, but I'm not interested or ok with trying to force a woman who wants children in to a childless relationship.

John Harvey Kellogg was an anti-masturbation fanatic, and developed corn flakes as a means to suppress libido. Seriously. They don't work for that purpose, of course, but then it isn't like logic and empirical testing were this dude's strong points.

If your assessment is that men should want to settle down with women to gain access to sex then I say "screw you" and I think pron is a wonderful equalizer. I am opposed to this idea that women should have this advantage that they get to use in relationships. "You do what I want or you don't get sex." That's manipulative and thus something I feel is wrong. So if porn equalizes that, takes away than, then great.

In my opinion a relationship needs to be because you both want each other, for whatever reason(s). It needs to be a mutual thing that you connect on any number of levels. You settle down because of all that, not because women make it a requirement to have sex.

Sorry, but that's the other half of the equality equation.

This is totally untrue. I can easily falsify by point out that it it WERE true that Slashdot would be filled with socially awkward men who don't know how to talk to women and live in their parents' basement.

You seem to think most users are clamouring for more space. That's really note the case. Heck I do media production (not on a professional scale) and I don't need more space. 60TB might sound wonderful to torrent heads who want to download everything they come across just to have it but to most users it is just excessive. I find most users don't even break 100GB, even with photos. People get large HDDs because they are cheap and larger = faster in HDD land, not because they need them.

Hence SSDs are very attractive to most people. They provide enough storage for your needs with much, MUCH better performance. They are also now getting down in the HD price category in terms of what an average user needs. If they can get a 2TB HDD for $150, or a 200GB SSD, for the same, they'll probably opt for the SSD. It is enough storage and way more performance. That it isn't as much storage per GB isn't relevant. Consumers care about it being cheap enough to afford and having enough storage for their needs.

I'm not saying that some people don't need tons of storage, but if you think the desktop user does, you are kidding yourself. The OS, a few apps, a few games, some pictures, some documents, it really only takes a couple hundred GB to be plenty.

Goes double with streaming video and download services like Steam. There gets to be no reason to packrat shit on the drive.

No, that's not true ... that's not at all what is holding "general AI" back. What's holding "general AI" back is that there is no way at all to implement it. Specialized AI is actually moving forward the only way we know how with actual results. Without further research in specialized AI, we would constantly get no closer to "generalized AI" and I keep using quotes around that because it's such a complete misnomer and holy grail that we aren't going to see it any time soon.

When I studied this stuff there were two hot approaches. One was logic engines and expert systems that could be generalized to the point of encompassing all knowledge. Yeah, good luck with that. How does one codify creativity? The other approach was to model neurons in software and then someday when we have a strong enough computers, they will just emulate brains and become a generalized thinking AI. Again, the further we delved into neurons the more we realized how wrong our basic assumptions were -- let alone the infeasibility to emulating the cascading currents across them.

"General AI" is holding itself back in the same way that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is holding back our free energy dreams.

We're so far from that, it humors to me to hear questions and any semi-serious question regarding it. It is not the malice of an AI system you should fear, it is the manifestation of the incompetence of the people who developed it that results in an error (like sounding an alarm because a sensor misfired and responding by launching all nuclear weapons since that what you perceive your enemy to have just done) that should be feared!

People are obsessed by the philosophical and financial prospects of an intelligent computer system but nobody's telling me how to implement it -- that's just hand waving so they can get to the interesting stuff. Right now, rule based systems, heuristics, statistics, Bayes' Theorem, Support Vector Machines, etc will get you far further than any system that is just supposed to "learn" any new environment. All successful AI to this point has been built with the entire environment in mind during construction.

And he was absolutely ruthless about all of them, ending careers on the spot if skippers and senior officers didn't live up to his near-impossible standards.

The "vertical chop" (where the guy who screwed up and about three levels of officers above him are forced into retirement) is still alive and well in the USN. The reality is any functional military is shaped like a pyramid, from an organizational standpoint. For each admiral slot you have many captains, for each captain slot you have many commanders, etc. So if there's any hint one of those mid-senior officers isn't competent, he's out - you need to get rid of a bunch of them anyway.

When I was working as a contractor supporting naval exercises it was amazing how fast the ships wanted telemetry data on their missile shots. The reason was if the ship was found to be at fault for two successive failures, by policy the captain was axed. That could mean something like a 19 year old fire control technician twisting a knob to the wrong setting.

WD and Seagate are morons in my opinion because neither have any kind of serious SSD lineup (both only have a couple enterprise parts, and I never see them mentioned on the list of companies to buy from). Higher HDD prices are just going to drive more people to SSDs as the SSD prices drop. It isn't a matter of competing on an equal dollar per GB amount, it is a matter of people close enough in absolute dollar terms.

So someone goes HDD shipping for a desktop, they find that it is somewhere in the $80-200 range, depending on what drive they want and what size. They look over at SSDs and discover, what do you know, you can have an SSD for that price. 128-160GB is perfectly doable in that range, maybe larger with sales (SSDs go on "sale" all the time).

Now it isn't near as much as an HDD. The HDDs are in the 500-2000GB range. However the person looks at their usage and discovers that they really don't use that much space, they can pack all their stuff in to 160GB no real problem. So they go for it, because of the massive increase in speed (an order of magnitude better seek times or more).

I've seen it happen many times. A friend just got a new laptop with a 160GB SSD. He was thinking about a 750GB HDD since he could store a lot of stuff, but looked and decided he really didn't have that much he needed and would rather have the speed.

While the HDD market isn't evaporating overnight, it is getting cut in to bigtime and it'll only get worse if the price differential changes.