is slim and none. It'd hardly be the first time the Parliament has voted for the right thing but the EC has said "well, we won't do that".

Colonizing Mars to protect against interstellar war would be like having your safe house on your patio. As for colonizing other planets we haven't got the technology for that any more than you could go to the moon with a horse carriage, just adding more horses won't help. It would be interesting to get started but I except a Mars colony to be dependent on Earth for centuries.

Full wrath of what? The whole of EU has a few hundred nukes and no known ICBMs, Russia has many thousands of nukes and delivery capability. Many European nations - like my own - have heavily cut troop levels, training and starved them of all heavy equipment after the Cold War ended, we have a few special forces for places like Afghanistan but in major ground combat we'd fall faster than the Maginot line did to the Blitz. Everybody in Europe leans on everybody else and if not that they lean on the US, but if push comes to shove I think we'll find it's like the Lehman Brothers, everybody is leaning on thin air. The main real strong point is that we're rather massive, it'd take a ridiculously big army to occupy 500 million people's countries, but per capita Europe is weak.

That's the nice theory, but in practice it's more like a prisoner's dilemma because they usually have more prospective employees lined up than you have prospective employers. They offer you a low-ball wage, either you take it and is employed and underpaid or some other guy takes it while you're still unemployed. If you'd all refuse they'd offer more, but as long as one of you is more desperate than the rest they continue their race to the bottom and they know in every pool there's someone who has hit that "Screw it, I need a job and I need it now" limit and will sign up. To a lesser degree everyone else who wants out of their old job too. Even if you think you're an above average negotiator for your profession - which you probably aren't - they've dragged the baseline down so low they can pretend to be generous.

Collective bargaining as you say won't be a perfect fit for the individual, but you're making the unsaid and wholly unsupported assumption that what's negotiable is a fixed pool which you get either way. "Give me X, or I walk out that door" is more often than not met with "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" while "Give us X, or we all walk out that door" is met with "Whoa whoa whoa let's not be hasty here, let's discuss this". If you get more power and can negotiate a bigger piece of the cake that way, then a slice of that can still be bigger than what you managed to negotiate on your own. They're just very good at making you think you did a great deal, that's what everybody's supposed to think. I think many would change opinion if they saw the salary pay-outs.

Well, for better or for worse the world has gotten smaller in many ways including this one. For example, all of Intel's CPUs that power most PCs in the world are made in 11 plants, 7 locations, 5 countries and if there's a WW3 I predict the countries involved would be "all of the above". Floodings in Thailand sent the whole world's HDD market skyrocketing. Assuming most of this is reduced to piles of rubble, key personnel lost, the whole supply chain of tools and purified silicon gone and there's post-war shortages on everything. None of this is anything you can make in your back yard, how long would you keep the computers running without replacements coming, 5 years? 10 years? 30 years is the estimated shelf life of a backup tape. Even if people in remote areas make it through by living a few decades with 1950s level of technology societies by then everything not put to paper will be gone.

These things are ridiculously asymptotic, what's the price of food now down at the grocery store when there is plenty? In the grand scheme of things very, very low. What happens if there's a famine and there's not enough food to go around? There's really no price high enough to starve. So I'm thinking yeah, today it might seem silly since processing power and storage space is plentiful but if shit really hits the fan? What's a working HDD worth to you if you're down to the last copy of something really important? What if there's none to be had no matter the price? It's harder to fail that hard with books, they're easy to print and there's a zillion printing presses around the world. Not so with high-end electronics.

A little and only specialty chips that don't compete with anything Intel has, also of course for profit but equally much to deny the "real" foundries customers and profit. So when Intel is looking to push into smart phones/tablets/hybrids I'd be very surprised if they at the same time built CPUs for smart phones/tablets/hybrids for Apple at any price, really. If I was Microsoft and I was thinking long term I'd rather give a helluva good deal on x86 chips for the next iDevice instead.

People. Remember y2k, when society would collapse overnight as all our fancy technology would be hit harder than a world-wide EMP burst? What we don't understand is blown hilariously out of proportion. And certain people seem to have an irrational belief in impending doom no matter how unlikely, I guess they're some kind of evolutionary emergency insurance policy. Personally I'm not afraid of people throwing bits and bytes at each other I'm afraid of those bits and bytes controlling far more traditional means of war.

For what, making their tablet interfaces similar to their desktop interfaces? I don't see this being anything similar to how they evicted other browsers, media players, zip software, cd burners, basic video editors, antivirus software and whatnot, sure they can make them similar but your desktop doesn't come with a "free" Windows tablet which you might as well use since you have it. You can't move a single Surface tablet without people going out and buying one. With that logic you'd quickly go overboard, then the Xbox had an antitrust advantage because they used DirectX's dominance in the PC market to gain a foothold in the console market. And Apple, boy did they use their iPods to sell their iPhones to sell their iPads, it's antitrust all around. No, this idea sucks but it's well within the borders of legal stupidity IMO.

Then Firefox will be to mobile what Java was to the desktop in the 90s, I don't see anything that could go wrong with that plan.

I'm pretty sure doctors have been going to the cinema every decade from they invented movies up until they they invented pagers, how about you have time on call (where you can't get smashing drunk, go hiking in the mountains or if this is done, go to the cinema) and real time off like in a civilized work relationship. That you in a real emergency might try calling anyway is fine, but nobody should ever really be on 24x7 call, even if you're the CEO you should have some kind of second in command that could step in if you for any reason is indisposed. If things would go that wrong without you the business is a disaster waiting to happen when you really can't be reached.

I think they mostly became atheists, that the universe existed entirely without some form of divine creator was too radical for the time. But in practice it means exactly the same, if there's no god or an absent god there's no point in churches, priests or prayers, no heaven or hell, either way there's simply no point in religion. For all practical intents and purposes a deist lives life exactly like an atheist, probably even more than an agnostic who might hedge their bets and not offend god because it might be true. And really here we're heading into foggy territory anyway, Big Bang violates pretty much every law of nature as we know it. God? Nature? Big question mark? Doesn't really matter, if there's no god here and now it's just for the history books.

But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "cashing out" in time instead, but on some level I think doing productive work is healthy and 40 hours a week is hardly that much.

For a single delta to a reference, but there's probably lots of redundancy in the deltas. If you have a tree/set of variations (Base human + "typical" Asian + "typical" Japanese + "typical" Okinawa + encoding the diff) you can probably bring the world estimate down by a few orders of magnitude, depending on how much is systematic and how much is unique to the individual.

The third reason is if the automation costs are declining, companies won't mind replacing a low wage job if a robot still undercuts it by half. And the labor market can't really adjust because humans have a living wage floor while robots don't. If rising labor costs were the prime driver we'd see more companies leaving China for poorer countries by now.

It's the world's oldest good cop/bad cop story, first we're terrible sinners that must be banished and entire cities nuked from orbit and then comes our savior who loves us and will forgive everything if we just love him back. The whole old testament is a guilt-trip in order to set us up to need redemption, then it comes like water to a man dying of thirst.