Frankly I'd be a bit iffy about the medical field. It has advantages with the guild like features keeping wages high in some positions and there are some obstacles to off-shoring, but it's also a field that will likely come under increasing pressure from AI and robotics in the not too far future. The gains to be made are simply so compelling and anything from diagnostics to surgery is potentially better done by machines (which in turn, due to the nature of the field, means that having an actual human doing either will basically be malpractice.)

Trade jobs that are hard to offshore and difficult to cost-effectively automate are probably a good choice. I'd stay away from the transportation sector as that too is likely to get automated to a significant degree within our life time.

I know I won't see it in a theatre, I simply don't have the patience for watching mindnumbing cgi+action without being able to fast forward anymore. I assume the movie will probably last about 10 minutes if you skip the meaningless bling so I'd probably be better served if someone cut together a summary and put on youtube.

A diagnosis may also be less useful when the problem is a natural reaction to a social environmental situation and lead to attempting to 'cure' the patient rather than fix the problems causing the reaction. Trying to treat of depression or anxiety caused by stress with long term use of medications is likely to lead to eventual failure of the medication or in the case of anti-anxiety drugs lead to addiction and problems from that, leaving the patient in an even worse situation than before.

I have yet to see any compelling argument that the human brain isn't 100% deterministic. The fact that it's complex does not necessarily make it non-deterministic and the underlying physics and chemistry founding the neural networks in the brain are not necessarily less deterministic than a neural network built out of silicon.

So if we create robots so sophisticated that their apparent sentience level is indistinguishable from a human it would be unethical not to afford them the same right. That, however, is quite far off still.

Yeah, and broken bones are most commonly a symptom of sports so obviously sports should be classified as a cluster of diseases.

And of course, if failure to produce offspring was actually some form of harm, the catholic priesthood should probably be diagnosed. Atheism, at least in the form of secular humanism, in general does not concern itself with where folks stick their parts or argue any moral obligation to reproduce.

If you're using the appropriate tools for doing this sort of thing, why do you need the password to be visible?

See, works both ways.

The real issue is that when the end user needs to input a password it simply should not be visible by default as there is no way to tell if the user is in a situation where the password can be observed during input. As the user cannot be expected, without major flashing red alerts all over the screen, to assume that the Fedora installer will work different from close to every other password field in every application available they cannot be expected to take appropriate precautions which will lead to security issues where the decision to make Anaconda 'special' will be entirely at fault.

I assume you have yet to find employment in todays average workplace?

Because corporate offices and many small company offices are notoriously lacking in privacy and the only time there's 'nobody in the room with you' is if you're doing your installations on christmas eve.

Having the (Fedoras) install process work different than basically everything else is a bad choice in itself. And changing everything else would be utter idiocy; there are many cases like classes, presentations, user assistance, etc, etc when passwords are entered with observers watching the screen. One would basically have to move to one-time passwords to bypass the issue.

Needlessly displaying passwords without significant compelling reasons is simply atrociously bad design. The only time it is ever even remotely justified in common practice is when very, very bad input devices make it difficult to know which character actually got entered.

Well, considering that Forbes in TFA claims "We donâ(TM)t really know how this coin is created. You canâ(TM)t have a functional money without a basic transparency. " I would argue that the actual problem is Steve Forbes lack of understanding of bitcoin. I doubt any other currency in the world is as transparent about how it works is created.

It's a pity as there are reasonable arguments (like yours and the GP's) for the short term, but his are merely uninformed.

I don't quite get how DNSSEC will solve anything, doesn't DNSSEC use trust anchors that can be just as comprimized as the current SSL 'trust'?

Or is there some special extra trustworthiness that makes the root signers more immune to coercion or trickery?

I paid for AC3D for exactly that reason once upon a time. Of course they later decided to not give a shit about their committment so no way I'm falling for that one again.

Thanks, a long but interesting article.

True. The issue is how we ascertain when human labour is obsolete as most economic models do not contain any provisions that deal with it. For example, the idea that lowering interest/expanding monetary supply will stimulate growth in employment is only valid if added demand actually leads to higher employment which may not be the case anymore.

Perhaps connecting 'standard' working week to unemployment levels would be possible to slowly adjust the economy and balance it, but that has its own problems as well.

By the time remote controlled robots would be usable enough to carry around and install office equipment it won't be long before we have robots that can do it without any remote control.

And I doubt there will be a significant time span where robot-maintainer is a useful job; we'll have robots for that too.

There needs to be a serious discussion on what kind of society we are going to have when human labour is obsolete. The current system will start seriously breaking down when capacity outstrips demand by a significant degree and any increase in demand will be met by further automation.

You cannot selectively enforce a law of nature or a mathematical law. Human laws are selectively enforced all the time. Intent and circumstances are often taken into account. Often history is considered. Sometimes even connections, wealth and race. All of those influence whether laws are enforced in any particular case.

Many judicial systems have significant discretionary powers, to the extent where, for better or worse, the letter of the law is often less important than the circumstances of the case.

IP is ultimately a form of taxation and redistribution and as such it contributes to the general cost level of the economy. Saying that IPR is needed because the jobs are the only ones that don't get outsourced to cheaper countries is equivalent to saying that we need higher taxes to pay for government jobs that are the only ones that don't get oursourced.

IPR simply makes an economy less competitive and is part of the reason why everything is too expensive to do in the west.

And frankly I can't see any reason why blockbuster couldn't trivially be outsourced. The script for most films could probably be written by, eh, a script. Effects can certianly be done anywhere and I really doubt actors will last beyond the decade before they start getting replaced by rendered versions.