Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.

It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...

I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.

Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.

By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.

Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...

I have to wonder why they talked to the VCs at all... I can imagine taking the risk if you've just started somebullshitwithnorevenuemodel.com and crazy guys in suits are offering you a giant stack of pretend internet money for it; but why would a company with an actual shipping product, and sales, and such, risk going up against the elite equity-diluting and value extraction skills of a hardened VC?

I, for one, am 100% gung-ho about having a 3rd-party in the 'cloud' handling every single one of my packets so that they can balance them between my connections!

The proprietary client adding complexity to my machine's network stack is a bonus, of course.

The other issue(aside from whether Nintendo has a right under law to do this or not) is whether Nintendo is being a load of idiots by doing this...

If a video of somebody playing a game is a good, or even adequate, substitute for that game, I think that it's fair to say that the game must really suck, badly. If it isn't a good substitute for the game, then "Let's Play" videos are likely to be free advertising for Nintendo, produced by enthusiasts. Given Nintendo's, um, totally commanding lead in the next-gen console area, maybe they shouldn't be turning that down, no?

Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.

Actually, you might want to skip the people buying fertilizer and just call in the people selling it...

I assume that v2 will include facial recognition cameras, a body-tracking kinect-style sensor, and full integration with facebook so that the entire internet can know who you are hitting on before the drink has even finished changing hands...

I'm not at all surprised that it is essentially dead in laptops, for the reasons you indicate.

What does surprise me a bit is that the MxM SIG appears to have made no attempt(at least no attempt that wasn't at least large enough to fail visibly) to try to turn MxM, or a slightly modified successor, into something for small form factor desktops, all-in-ones, and the like.

A pretty substantial chunk of boring corporate desktops come in a small form factor flavor that incorporates some laptop parts, or near laptop parts; but still cram themselves tightly enough to leave room for a (half height) PCIe x16 slot(sometimes even two, in recent models). You'd think that something easier to swap than on on-motherboard option; but smaller than a full x16 PCIe card, might be a fit there. Aside from one or two of the iMac models, though, I've not seen MxM in space-constrained non-laptops anywhere.

Was there anything at all about CIOs, or was that just another pop-psych regurgitation of 'Primate Power: use these hackneyed verbal tricks to pretend that you are the monkey with the biggest cock in the room!' as seen far too often in the various 'self-help for the painfully mediocre' columns that run in various media?

Even under the (probably quite generous) assumption that this advice is true, it's the kind of thing that you aren't going to learn just by reading, any more than you can become a good actor just by skimming a few scripts.

Don't ask me. It was the Labor Statistics expert system that added 'organic fertilizer' as a job category. Apparently it's a growth industry, because the number of people who were previously unemployed; but applied for 'kinetic retraining' and found jobs there in the last quarter alone has been tremendous. The numbers don't lie!

I'm afraid that the new Google Scoop(tm) riot management solution is fully automated and operates on the basis of Maps(tm) data and the Policy-Based-Disposition matrix specified by your jurisidiction's compliance specialist through the easy-to-use admin panel.

I may be giving the professor too much credit; but my impression was that he was predicting a situation where advances in automation made robots more cost-effective than humans for essentially any task... Not that that would necessarily lead to especially pleasant outcomes for the redundant humans.

People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.