I was in Memphis when this all happened, and the word there, which I think is correct, is that a bakers' union held out for a strike after other unions involved had made concessions, etc. And those unions were more angry with the bakers than they were with management.

Those unions had access to the company's books, and their understanding of the financial position of the company based on that access led to their making the concessions that the bakers' union would not. (I also recall that the bakers didn't choose to believe the company, and did not bother to check whether or not it was true... this was not so much a management-union issue as a stupid union issue. Just don't go tarring all of the unions involved for what one union did.

I think this is a bit too much deconstruction for something that Occam's Razor gives us a better explanation for...

Clark Kent is an intentional stereotype whose characteristics distract nearly everyone from recognizing his 'true identity'. He needs glasses to see, he makes out like he has no courage -- who would ever suspect someone like THAT of being the Man of Steel.

This is a fairly common trope in literature, including, offhand, examples from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Perry the Platypus. (There is a famous one in Golden Age science fiction, who pretends to be drunk and feeble-minded, but I do not remember either the title or the author -- rats! Hive mind, help me out...)

I don't think I would read more than this into that character... but wouldn't DC have fun with that general theme?

I saw this in the article:
"A super-intelligent machine could be given a straightforward goal â" such as making 32 paper clips or calculating pi â" but "could pursue unlimited resource acquisition if there were no relevant cost to the agent of doing so"."

The first thing I thought was "hey, isnt that just like T.S. Eliot at his banking job?"

The second thing I thought was 'does this remind any of you of Bomb in the movie 'Dark Star'?

The third thing I thought about was the Keith Laumer stories with artificially-intelligent bureaucratic devices that were waaaaay too sophisticated for their users' own good... and of course, right after that, up came the consequences from Woody Allen's toaster being networked...

My concern is that all the techniques humans use to influence organic computers would be used on cybernetic machinery, and there is a considerable amount of science fiction (good and bad) that deals with the consequences of teaching intelligent machinery the wrong things, or the expedient things, or the mistakenly contradictory things, that produce neuroses, prejudice, and even outright misanthropy in the existing intelligent systems that are people. HAL was just fine until he had to process conflicting agendas phrased as directives; so was David Mace's Nightrider. (And we haven't quite gotten to the WOPR or Skynet -- and we're still stuck dealing with the anthropic fallacy in assuming how evolved 'intelligent' systems might manage what 'intelligence' constitutes.

I recognized back in the early days of the Obama administration that there was a key quid pro quo for bailing out the large banking firms that were caught in the real-estate crisis trap of their own making.

Each one of those firms had its own synthetic model of the economy, probably researched in fine detail and hyperlinked in clever ways. I thought that part of the 'price' for a Government bailout would be the sharing of the code, architectural details, etc. of these various programs, which could then be set up somewhere like Bay St. Louis to be run for the advantage of... well, ultimately, the American taxpayer.

I suspect we are now seeing the results of exactly why that technology wasn't demanded.. publically, at least... and perhaps how we can expect to see it used in future...

...that Steve Mann had to pay the price for this sort of 'performance art'.

The wider issue, though, is not so much that arbitrary Google-Glass-enabled people are invading privacy, bad though that might be. The problem comes if your Google account is hacked (likely a common problem) or some other method of stealing or diverting the video stream takes place. We've already had some evidence of the 'flip side' of this technology with schools sneakily enabling laptop cameras and mics "to check whether students are doing their homework" -- a bit like all those smoke detectors they put in at Princeton in the '70s -- which didn't save Whig Hall from burning down, but certainly gave notice when students were smoking that wacky tobaccy...

And now that we have a government that helps with something like Stuxnet, that Snowden has described as desirous of exploiting private 'social' information, and at least probably interested in using law and policy to harass what it perceives as its opponents. I would not be happy about the prospects if widespread pervasive 'video streaming' were to become common...

Does anyone else see the 'elephant in the room' point: It's OK to use a mouse AND a touchscreen when operating a computer or running an app or SaaS. In fact, it's OK to be able to use the touchscreen at one moment and then (perhaps because you're eating a sandwich or need different haptics) using a mouse or pad the next.

This issue was fought out, I thought, back in the early days of Mac OS software, with command shortcuts and having the same prompt placeable in different menus (to give two different examples of multiple modalities for a single command function) There are times when it's more intuitive to touch a screen image, or write on it, than it is to do the AutoCAD draw-like-you-were-a-coxswain approach; there are other times when precisely aiming a mouse pointer works better.

The point is NOT to do what Windows 8 did (and in a different sense, what NeXTstep's Interface Builder did) and make everything fit into one Procrustean object model or interface modality.

(I'm typing this on a Mac Air, with a mouse and keyboard to plug in via USB when I want, and occasionally musing on what an idiot Steve Jobs was for saying there would never be a Mac laptop with touch enablement...)