Yeah, as soon as the AIs can take over all our jobs I'm afraid the general public won't get the profit from it. The divide between poor and rich will become wider not smaller. There will be a few very rich people controlling the machines and billions of poor. Knowing human nature a bit 'they took our jobs!', I think we'll just smash up the machines, lynch those controlling them with pitchforks and torches, and start the nonsense all over.
I'd very much like it if we could keep the advantages of technology and have everyone profit from it, but given how things have been going this decennium I don't believe in such star-trek idealism anymore :)

This is an incredibly sad story, I always found it one of the most hateful stories about human behaviour but also a good lesson. People with extraordinary talent are used as long as they are needed, then the 'war' is over and the public doesn't care about them anymore. Then they turn into just another pawn that can be used for political games because they are 'different' in some way. Your past performances in no way protect you, as people take those for granted. In a way, it's the comparable to how soldiers/war heroes are treated, for example those with post traumatic stress. Locked away and forgotten.

Indeed, that was my idea as well. Just make digital copies for the public, then make whoever wants buy the originals. As long as the information is preserved for the public, who cares...

Because you save a lot of developer time by using the higher-level languages for higher-level parts of the application, which usually make up the larger part. C is comparatively verbose, hard to read, and error-prone.

Depends. If you need raw computation/throughput speed, I agree Java is faster than Python/Ruby without C extensions such as numpy. But with C extensions, I'm sure Java can be beaten easily, as C is still the language of choice for fast low-level stuff. When considering startup time, Python/Ruby is much faster than launching a JVM.

+100 insight If you're going to do this panopticon nanny state thing then please try to at least take care of your people, keep them happy in every part of their lives not just 'security'. North Korea does *not* qualify as a nanny state. I guess in a true nanny state you require much less actual surveillance, as most people will voluntarily give up their information. Also, there would almost be no government violence. It'd just be for those 'children' that don't want to play along : I don't like the idea either, but it's better then the direction that we seem to be going.

FYI: SSL-based name virtual hosting (using TLS) already exists for quite a while now, and is called SNI (Server Name Indication). You don't really need an IP per host anymore. For apache. see here: http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

Yes. Unity is based on GTK and Gnome. It's as asimple as that. I don't see what's all the panic about. You will still be using the Gnome applications. It would have been a bigger jump if they went for KDE/QT.

yeah, what they forget for their bout of sensationalism is that Unity is simply a variant of GNOME.

Not only 14 year old goths, as it seems, 'emo' appeals to a much wider public than 'tech'. So for commercial reasons they usually try to downsize the sci-fi element and amplify the drama. Which is why you won't see a happy sci-fi series any time. It would mainly appeal to nerds like us who are excited about science, physics, technology of the future and what is possible with it :)

Well, the old scifi series such as Star Trek were utopian instead of dystopian. I think it's more like a sign of the times that everything on the future is dystopian these days. Not even suspension of disbelief can help people imagine a future where things turn out good for everyone, anymore.

"Remote shutting down" people that way makes me think of an old story by Harlan Ellison ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Repent,_Harlequin!%22_Said_the_Ticktockman ), it deals with a dictator that can shut off people their heart remotely if they misbehave.

I like this one: http://www.die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html It's based on Qt4 so it should work on windows as well, though I haven't tried.