I can understand wanting to get away from google. Whether apple or microsoft are also guility is different, with them you are atleast the customer, you pay them for services and software; however with google you are the product and google sells you to all their customers (other big evil corporations). Now if google had the same integrity they seemed to have at the start, you might be more inclined to keep on going with the deal; but with them taking ownership of your email and mining it for data, forcing everyone onto google+, the locking down of android, buying double click, killing of projects that arn't profitable enough, i can easily understand peoples fears.

Hardly, these people are making all the same mistakes google has (dual, see through, full size glasses lenses please). For an acquisition you need to come up with a product people actually want. Solve all the problems, generally put in all the hard yards, and be able to take the market by storm; then you can get a few billion to shut you up, while google uses it to make the same money every quarter.

They will only let us fly to work in these multirotor vehicles when computers are the ones doing the flying. When you cant trust some one to use an indicator, or keep out of the right hand lane when not overtaking, then your not going to be able to trust them with another dimension, and multiple spinning blades of doom (well maybe if you get them through the long process of getting a piolts licence). Also if you want a full size mutirotor aircraft electric has a lot of advantages, less wear and tear, easier system to test for propblems before flight, and the motors need very quick changes in speed for stability, which electronic speed controlls and electric brushless motors do excelently; we just need better electrical storage, which is on its way.

The only way i see humans being able to stay in the loop is brain upgrades. If you get a few proccessors, and fast memory/storage up there, and the bus connection to our consciousness dosn't cause too much of a drag factor on the machine, then we maybe able to keep up for a bit longer. That said i have no doubt we will exceed human brain speeds with other tech in the future (current neruomorphic chips are slowed down over a thousand times, just so humans can keep up with whats going on).

With suffcient AI inteligence, per human productivity can theoritcally be infinite, because there is no reason for everyone on earth to have infinte productivity (2 times infinity is stil infinity) only a few rich people will under capitalism.

answer. The robot will work for a lot less, and for a lot longer, with a lot less complaining.

You shouldn't call yourself a geek if you don't think those things will be able to be done by a computer at some point. Science will be one of the first from the list to suffer as robot reserchers will be able to work a lot quicker, processing a lot more information, and trying many more theories than a human could. Actors, artists and musicians may stay human, not becuause robots couldn't do it, just because we will feel better about it (like human sports will keep going, even though the robot olympics will be a lot more impressive); although actors will be able to be made full CGI; AI musicians will be able to play thousands of instuments at once at a fraction of the setup speed; artists, well i don't buy a lot of convential art so i'm not the best judge, but maybe if it was at robot made price maybe i would.

I understand that fine and agree with you. What i think you are failing to understand (which is what the story is about) is the next machine revoultion, wont be like the last one, because we wont be putting humans in the loop any more. In the past revoultions more jobs were created (because of the expansion and the need for human decision making), but soon in this revoultion, anything you can do, a robot will be able to do cheaper and better. It will be a hard sell to share holders that you should use a human for a job when a good robot is aviliable. We arn't replacing the OX in this revoultion (like the agricultural revoultion did) we are replacing the human.

Who is going to pay you more, to do a worse job, at a slower rate?

and when they are smarter and cheaper than a human they will do %99 of the jobs done in the present.

robots will be able to design almost all kinds of products. They will be able to design every possible version of the tool/machine then virtually test them all to decide the best. Besides who says a robot can't do it the human way aswell, once we get a bit further with neromorphic chips they will be able to use best answer instead of right answer, and considering the chips can be run 100 times faster than a human, the machines will have a huge advatage. Besides i see plenty of people in society that are incabable of anything more mentally draining than digging a ditch (they dig great ditches but don't ask them to design a new kind of bridge or dishwasher). You will need stuff for people to do but i think you'll retain a similar number of ture creative people. Real problem is, who is paying all these billions of people, when all the real work is being done by robots (probably owned by google), communism is evil remember.

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. ACCEPTANCE

Am i the only one here that thinks android apps are barely passable as software. If you manage to find one without insane access rights, it's either complete crap covered with adds, or they charge you $5 for something you could do on windows, mac, or linux for free in much better quality. The last thing i want is android apps on my laptop, But if the pc makers think this will save the industry, who am i to judge they are obviously very intune with the market (not like they needed intel a chip maker, to hold their hands and help them make ultrabooks). Screw android apps just give me a high res screen, very decent graphics, big battery, and relitivaly thin profile while leaving all my ports where they were.

show me one piece of supporting evidence for your claim of zero potential difference charging. If you could charge something using the exact same voltage what would decide the direction of power?

also of course i remember where i work, i'm going back there tomorrow, so expect to get a bunch of AC replies (i don't think they have /. accounts) from my friends when we all have a good laugh about this.

If you can disprove anything in my last paragraph (i would say anything i've written, but i don't think your grasping this at all, and want to limit the stupid replies you give me) i have a prize for you, my electrical egineering degree (because you will have completely changed electrical theory, and it will be worthless). By the way, you telling me your imaginary physics proffesor said so, isn't disproving anything, show me some citiation (hell, order the book from amazon, it's going to say i'm right).

The charger isn't being hooked up in series, the phone battery and the phone internals (processor, screen, modem) is connected in series (which is why the battery and the phone gets the 5 volts it needs from a usb plug). Try taking the battery out of your phone (if possible), then plug it into the charger, you will notice nothing will happen. This is because, power flows from the power lines into your home, through diodes and transformers, into a some kind of plug, THEN INTO THE BATTERY, THEN INTO THE PHONE (that is how series works, one then the other, different to parralel which is both at the same time), then from the phone internals back to the battery, and then back to the plug and charger to complete the circuit. The phone and battery being hooked up in series, has absoultly nothing to do with which way the charger is hooked up (you still need to connect positive to positive and negitive to negitive) it would be the same even if you connected your phone internals and battery in parralel (although then you would need twice the volts to charge (because the voltage is being split between two sources) then as your battery got close to being fully charged, the internal resistance of the battery would increase, so you'll be sending more and more volts straight to the phone (which could blow it up)).

Power flows from the source with the highest potential; nothing will happen if you manage to connect two voltage sources that are exactly the same; when you charge your phone, all the volts go to both the phone and the battery, it is the amps that get split between the two; check it out with your physics teacher if you don't belive me.