Why wouldn't humans exist? We're not talking of conditions that would kill humans after all. Just merely warm enough to melt ice on Greenland.

So we don't have even a scrap of evidence that there was ever life on Mars, but evidence is "building" that we come from there. No, that's not science.

And how are organic molecules going to turn into tar in the presence of ample water and little heat (such as the case on the surface)? He seems to have neglected that high levels of liquid water (yet another oxide, but one which was prevalent in the early Earth environment) also inhibits the formation of tar.

The only argument against water as the tar-inhibitor agent is that it is "corrosive" to RNA. But which of these three compounds (including oxides of boron and molydenum) are currently found in living cells in quantity?

On the contrary, and Samantha Wright please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think a whole big hunking lot of single-cellular life can in fact survive being frozen. I mean, come on, human fucking sperm even does. Never mind that frozen life is well, frozen. While the DNA repair mechanisms are dormant, so are the copying mechanisms. Bacteria can live quite deep within porous rocks. I'm not exactly sure if it's really necessary for ejecta to be always heated up to sterilization. Now I'm not saying that this little life-from-Mars theory has got any legs to stand on just yet, but your arguments don't really do much to discount it, I don't think.

In present money. Remember that will be more money by the time that ice gets "stacked".

Look at how much money is involved. These are scraps. For example, the total funding discussed in these articles is around $100 million over nine years. In comparison, the World Wildlife Fund, a large non profit that is one of the bigger private-side advocacy groups for global warming theory, gets that much in public funding every three to four years.

And look who's doing the funding. It's mostly by the Koch brothers not Big Oil.

And only 1031 years after it was named so in order to trick people into immigrating there, better late than never I guess.

It's worth noting that the story doesn't actually show that ocean acidification has an effect on Pacific Northwest oysters, but rather that local, far higher acidification of a particular hatchery has such an effect.

Interesting how your link forgot to mention that the area was experiencing unusually high CO2 levels that couldn't be explained by normal absorption of atmospheric CO2. I just scraped a little veneer off and whoops, there went the conclusion.

How is that different than standing in front of a cab with a human driver? Either the driver (or car) will back up and maneuver around you, or the driver and/or car will call dispatch (or the police) to say he's blocked in. Human drivers are (normally) programmed to take no action that can be reasonably predicted to harm a human, but turning around or otherwise maneuvering to get around an obstacle (even a human obstacle) is not necessarily going to trigger that response.

Well the whole topic was about the job market, so it was in that context. Not going to correct myself on that one.

Must have never heard of prosecutorial discretion, then. Nobody, neither personally nor at any level of government, has any obligation to uniformly enforce all laws. I'd have hoped that people who think otherwise are just happy drug users - to my bewilderment, it turns out not to be the case :(

Most people would go crazy without having a job or otherwise being occupied somehow.

So somehow energy use in a non-free market capitalist country is automatically "excessive"? I consider that opinion merely irrational.

And highly subsidized energy isn't "cheap" energy.

Having said that, I'm all for selling electricity in relatively free markets.

The major gain from Watson-like solutions is that you can have a multi-specialist system. It's nigh impossible for a family doctor to have specialist (as opposed to general) knowledge in other areas of medicine. Such specialist knowledge could be useful, though, so a Watson-style solution may turn out to be a vastly better doctor in the end. The human touch still matters, of course, but that means you can have a Watson-backed nurse relegating classical doctors into the dustbin of history.

Do think think most people are low-skilled just because of a poor attitude? The Peter Principle is saying everyone has a level of incompetence they will eventually reach on their career ladder, well robots taking over the menial work is like chopping the bottom off that ladder. Eventually you're going to have people who can't get on the ladder at all and "just climb higher" isn't going to work for them. So far robots have mostly outperformed humans in terms of things like strength, speed, accuracy, reproducibility but if they start outwitting people you're starting to run out of reasons to hire people at all. I'm sure you've met developers who you'd just not want on your team, you'd finish faster and better without them. Take that and scale it up to the workforce, imagine the whole job market saying we don't need you or at least not so many of you.

That's a remarkably crappy way to describe what's going on. There's no "subversion" of what doesn't exist. You can have infrastructure that is somewhat capitalist and/or communist in nature which enables you to own and use things in ways that can't be done in the absence of that infrastructure.

If you're going to attack it, then any weakness like this is fair game.